


Far From the Tree

by Vali



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Childhood, Family Dynamics, Gen, Post-Series, Pre-Series, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 06:36:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5153903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vali/pseuds/Vali
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love, trust, and understanding aren't synonyms.  How the Holmes parents first met, and what came after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Far From the Tree

**Author's Note:**

> Starts pre-series, ends several months—or years—after S3. Includes character cameos from an outside source (see the end notes for details, but beware a plot spoiler); however, this isn't a crossover and no knowledge of said source is required. As Mr. and Mrs. Holmes don't seem to have first names, "Reggie" and "Marian" were my own, non-canonical choices. Many thanks to Nonelvis for beta work above and beyond the call of duty.

_Marian_

"You," her aunt loved to say, grinding the words between her teeth and spitting them out like blowdarts, "you live in your own high-and-mighty head. Up there in the clouds, no use for us peasants who keep body and soul together. Just like your mother. As if I don't already have troubles enough."

Marian couldn't deny this, honestly, though why it was such a shame and a horror to live in one's head she didn't understand at all. She certainly wouldn't get an answer from Aunt Jean, no way to get a word in edgewise during the litany of self-pity about dead husbands and working her fingers to the bone and now, on top of it all, having to take in her gone-to-the-dogs dead sister's dreamy, lazy, little-madam daughter. Marian wasn't particularly happy about the arrangement herself, but as it was all she knew she had nothing else to pine for. Not like Aunt Jean, who sighed and yearned for fancy-free merry widowhood as though, before Marian, she'd been off yachting in the Caribbean. Whatever she'd been doing she certainly hadn't been up to her elbows in Fairy Liquid, that was forever Marian's lot.

 _Just like your mother,_ a memory too vague and shadowy to elicit pain. But then, what exactly had she been like? This was the sum knowledge Marian had of her: she'd had curly hair (so showed the lone photograph Aunt Jean had of her, consigned to the bottom of a drawer). She wasn't particularly pretty, but something about her smile (again, the photograph) made you want to keep looking at her nonetheless. Boys had liked her smile very much, but that'd done her no good because—her aunt seemed to relish telling her, again and again—she'd been born bad, bad from the start. In the end she'd gone with men, for money. ( _Gone where, exactly?_ Marian always wanted to ask. But she knew, without asking, she wouldn't get an answer.) 

She had gone with men, for money, and then she'd disappeared. Dead. Many women who went with men had disappeared, in that decaying disregarded northern town, in that perpetually rainy postwar summer. Then a man, a good respectable middle-class husband and father, had been found dead in turn, near the end of summer, and after that women suddenly stopped dying. That much Marian had been able to piece together herself, from overheard whispers and accidental admissions and the newspapers archived in local libraries, but before half the jigsaw puzzle was completed she wearied of the task and stopped. Detective work only looked like fun in the movies; the real thing was dreary and monotonous and it made her head hurt. What sort of person did that all the time, every day? She couldn't even imagine it. Miss Marple had to be a bit potty to even want to.

School was also dreary and monotonous and made her head hurt, but then Miss Sherrinford came along and everything changed. Ann Sherrinford taught maths. Ann Sherrinford was young. Ann Sherrinford had strawberry hair and wisteria-sprays of freckles and a disarmingly swift smile and was as relentless a taskmaster as any child ever encountered, and Marian didn't mind a bit because Miss Sherrinford made maths what Marian had always known them to be. Enthralling. Exhilarating. Elegant. When Marian tried to explain—as she usually could not—how she could barely fathom times tables yet multiply and divide anything effortlessly in her head, how a geometric sequence was something you _felt_ and not something you sat down and worked out on paper, Miss Sherrinford not only listened but seemed, however tacitly, to understand. She loved Miss Sherrinford, but then the whole school did, from the headmaster on down.

One day, Miss Sherrinford asked Marian to stay after class and her eyes, above the ready smile, were most apologetic. "I'm afraid, my dear," she said, "that there's nothing more I can teach you. I simply wouldn't know how."

Marian just stared. Was Miss Sherrinford telling her she had to leave the class? Her shoulders sagged, her eyes filled with tears, and then Miss Sherrinford was patting her arm and telling her chin up, for heaven's sake, what was all this _drama_ for? She loaded Marian's arms down with books, names on the spines she'd never heard before in her life: Gauss. Noether. Hilbert. Al-Qalasadi. Bharucha-Reid. Bouillot. Dedekin. Iyengar. Her eyes burned from reading too long, too late under the covers, and her brain pulsed and throbbed with so much beauty she wanted to shout it aloud on the streets. In her aunt's house, though, she had no choice but protective quiet.

"Al-kwar-is-mee," Aunt Jean sounded out, from the cover of the book she'd snatched from Marian's hand, then tossed it aside. "What," she laughed, "plain old English numbers aren't fancy enough for you now, got to go running after a lot of wogs?"

"My aunt says I'm wasting my time," Marian told Miss Sherrinford one day, hesitantly, over the cups of tea they now took together after school to discuss the beautiful books. "She says the only maths girls need to know are how to size up a dress pattern and add a grocer's bill. She says I'll never get married if I strut about thinking I'm smarter than—"

"Bloody _bollocks,_ " Miss Sherrinford said.

As the words flew from her she clapped a hand to her own mouth, appalled, and Marian started giggling and couldn't stop. Then Miss Sherrinford joined in. And that, as they say, was that.

Miss Sherrinford talked, argued, hectored, on Marian's behalf. Even to the headmaster, even to Aunt Jean, for all the good that did. Miss Sherrinford demanded unstinting work from her, and got it. Miss Sherrinford told her she had to change the way she spoke, that she would have a hard enough time being listened to as a woman without that in the way as well. Marian did the elocution exercises in her room, when her aunt wasn't awake to jeer and slap her, moving mouth and jaw slowly just as Miss Sherrinford had shown her to remold and shape her vowels like soft clay. She wasn't foolhardy enough, however, to test her progress on any ears at school.

"There's not a thing wrong with the way you sound now," Miss Mycroft declared, with Dundee vowels and an edge of irritation. She'd begun joining Marian and Miss Sherrinford at their teas, now and then, which Marian didn't mind as she always brought a vanilla slice. "You're setting her up to run right into a brick wall—"

"I'm setting her up," Miss Sherrinford retorted, as if she'd quite forgotten Marian were there, "for Senior Wrangler and everything that comes after. Why should they all be able to write her off, the moment she opens her mouth?"

"They'll do it anyway, for being a girl, and you know it." Miss Mycroft stabbed a fork into her slice as though it had gone on the attack. "Senior Wrangler? What does she need with that nonsense? She's already past any of it and she's not even thirteen. Really, Annie, don't waste her time."

 _What's a Senior Wrangler?_ Marian thought, but munched her pastry and held her peace.

Gladys Mycroft taught art and the school didn't love her, not even a little, but they didn't have to when she, too, understood beauty like no one else. It seemed, in a way, as though it should've been her with her tailored tweed skirts and stolid chiseled features who taught maths and Miss Sherrinford, with her excited fluttering hand gestures and soft pretty sky-blue cardigans, who taught art, but life was funny that way, wasn't it. Miss Mycroft told Marian about Gaspard Monge and Brunelleschi and _De divinia proportione,_ and after some of her lessons Marian was wrapped up in such rapt contemplation that she rather forgot where she was, her surroundings vanishing altogether before the equations and structures in her head. Of course she had been prone to that anyway, for as long as she could remember.

"For God's sake!" Miss Mycroft scolded her, after Marian, drunk on large draughts of descriptive geometry and Picasso, tripped and fell headlong into a bank of folded easels. "You'll break your head if you don't keep track of your feet, and poor Annie would have my guts for garters."

Marian always had to remind herself that "Annie" was Miss Sherrinford. That Miss Mycroft was so solicitous of Miss Sherrinford's feelings, though, that was no surprise. For the whole school adored Miss Sherrinford, even wry, dry-witted, unsentimental Miss Mycroft. That told you everything, now didn't it?

The whole school loved Miss Sherrinford, until the day it didn't. Until the day there were sniggers and giggles and whispers up and down every corridor, all disseminating a language Marian couldn't understand, and then, unbelievably, Miss Sherrinford and Miss Mycroft both abruptly resigned. Marian, suddenly all too much in the here and now, found Miss Sherrinford emptying out her desk like a thief in terror of the police, and when she saw Marian standing there in the doorway her shoulders sagged, her eyes filled with tears.

"I'm sorry, dear," she said, her voice raw and wretched and yet gentler than ever before. "It's better I'm not seen talking to you, not anymore. But the books are yours, I want you to keep them. Bury them in a bloody hole somewhere if you have to, away from that wretched harridan of an aunt, but keep them." Not bothering with a handkerchief, she mopped her eyes on her cardigan sleeve. "Use them. Work hard. Get out."

Then she was off, down the main hallway, before Marian had any chance to say goodbye. _Did you go with men?_ Marian wanted to shout, bewildered, after the swiftly retreating form bowed in sadness and defeat. _Is that why you have to leave?_

But she didn't understand any of it, not then, not for years afterward.

******

She stopped hiding her books. She stopped disguising the new way she spoke—the Miss Sherrinford way, the last link to her—and after the day she slapped Aunt Jean right back there'd been an end to any sneering and jeering about that. It did indeed open several doors, ones that even her mind couldn't unlock on its own. But then, Marian thought, sitting upright in an armchair before a crackling fire, as her tutor droned on and on until she was ready to combust with boredom, Miss Mycroft had been right: What had she ever needed with all of this? Senior Wrangler? What was she going to do with that, _teach?_ Just look at the rewards that got you! She could think and write and theorize all on her own, she didn't need any pile of buildings to prop her up. Other than the two true teachers she'd lost she'd never needed anyone else, all her life, and that was the real reason the Aunt Jeans of the world so hated her.

"I can't believe you're even considering this," the head of her college said in disbelief, as Marian sat upright in a straight-backed chair waiting for the folderol to be over with. "The career you've got in front of you, how can you even think of cutting it short? The papers you've already published, your work on the Navier-Stokes equations, your seventeenth additive base conjecture, it's all absolutely unprecedented—"

"Well, there's none of it," she noted, with no more than plain truth, "that I absolutely need to do _here._ "

She'd worked hard. She'd got out. She'd honored Miss Sherrinford, paid her tribute in fact every time she opened her mouth, and now as far as she was concerned, all her obligations were finished. She was at liberty now to walk away, to stop talking, to return to golden ratios and sky-blue conjectures and the myriad hues and spectrums of time.

The head of her college was sputtering. "Do you have any idea," he demanded, "what accomplishments, what sort of success you're on the verge of throwing—"

"I don't want to succeed," she said, with no more than plain truth. For the first time in years she felt happy, truly happy, and free.

"Look, I understand you must feel overworked. You've pushed yourself relentlessly, we've all been more than a bit worried about you. If you need to take some time to rest, to recuperate, we all completely—"

"I'm sorry," Marian said serenely, as she rose from her chair. "It's better I'm not seen talking to you."

He was still sitting there, in a fog of bewilderment, as Marian went through the main hallway and out the door.

******

_Reggie_

She was lucky not to be a stain on the roadway. That was what they kept telling her, anyway, the day she walked out of the corner shop where she worked and, while contemplating her own twenty-third additive base conjecture, blithely headed straight into oncoming traffic. Now here she sat on a grimy plastic-cushioned bench in A&E, covered in scuffs and bruises head to foot, waiting patiently for someone to tend a sprained wrist. What of it? Yet more time to think. She sat back against the faintly squeaking cushion, eyes half-closed in rumination, and then was distracted by a soft, but persistent throat-clearing inches from her ear.

"Sorry, I said, did you want to read that?" a man on her left was asking, indicating someone or other's discarded newspaper lying on the empty space to her right. "If you do, I can—"

"Oh, no," she assured him. It had taken her a moment to realize he was speaking to her, but it often took her a moment or two to realize she'd been drafted into conversation. "Please do."

He rose, a little painfully—she hadn't even heard him sit down—limped the few steps to where the newspaper lay, and limped back with his prize in hand. Still feeling distracted for no reason she could pinpoint (for other than the paper's soft rustle, he wasn't making a particle of noise), Marian glanced over, examining him in profile. Long narrow face, long straight nose, very dark hair just the slightest bit longer, more flowing, than was entirely right—back then, before the Beatles and all that—for a man. Leonine, wasn't that called? Sensing her gaze he turned, briefly, from the football scores, giving her a swift, rather disarming smile. 

"Glad that lorry didn't take you out," he said.

She must have looked startled, because he hastened to explain. "Your sleeve," he said, indicating a long, pockmarked ashen smear she herself hadn't noticed. "That tire track's a bit wide for a car, and you can juuuust see what looks like a bit of the rim diameter and load index code numbers, imprinted just there." His finger rested briefly on her jacket, touching the cloth without pressing into her skin. "152 load capacity? That's no automobile. My dad's a mechanic. You pick it up."

Marian raised her arm—carefully, for her wrist really stung—and turned the sleeve to the light. There, just below a long tear in the pale yellow fabric, the arabesques of a tire tread, numeric specters marked out in grease. 

"I see," she said, rather thoughtfully, and glanced down at his foot. "Did you bump into a lorry as well?"

"I tripped over Widow Twankey," he explained.

She must have looked confused, for he leaned confidingly forward. "I'm the understudy for Wishee Washee, you see, in the _Aladdin_ over at the Four Quarters Theatre. Well, the real Wishee's got flu so I was rushing about backstage like a mad thing trying to find the rest of my costume, and I went into this storage room with no lights and Twank and PC Pong, they were—er, forgive me, but it's just the truth, they were having it off right there on the floor, and I tripped over them and went flying." He shook his head at his own folly. "And, well, I yelled a bit loudly thinking my ankle was broken and that brought everyone else running in, and Twank lives with the director so the director's not too happy with him at the moment? And PC Pong's not the least happy with me."

Marian tried, as best she could, to make sense of this curious string of words. "So you're an actor?" she finally guessed.

"Oh, yes," he said, his smile broadening and eyes lighting up as though she'd just paid him a wonderful compliment. "Rudy, my brother Rudy—he's marvelous, you should see his Wicked Fairy—he took me to an audition one day, for the moral support, y'see, and we both got cast, not for the part he was after but turns out they needed a pair of twins. Well, we are twins, but I mean, they wanted the kind who look alike. We don't, but from the third row we almost could. He's got the real talent, but that's how I got started."

He stopped short, as if he had only just realized how much he'd been talking; he blinked in rapid succession several times, leaned back again in what seemed like embarrassment. Marian considered the newfound silence between them and found, to her surprise, that she didn't like it.

"Is acting always this hazardous?" she asked.

He looked down at his injured foot, the sock rolled down to relieve the swollen ankle. "Oh, well, y'know," he said. "Now and then."

"My job's not exciting or dangerous," she said. "It's incredibly dull. I prefer it that way. But I like interesting stories."

Reggie—Ronnie? Robbie? she didn't quite catch his name when he offered it—hemmed and hawed a bit, for no reason she could fathom, and then asked her if perhaps, possibly, once their war wounds were tended to, she'd like to get a bite to eat sometime. Well...yes, in fact, she found that yes, she would. He had an audition somewhere or other that evening, sorry to say, but Tuesday? That was tomorrow, wasn't it? Yes, Tuesday would be just fine. 

She'd gathered that when a man asked you out—something that hadn't ever happened to her, and that she'd forgotten was a possibility—he was meant to bring a gift, something nice but not so nice that you'd feel, whatever this meant, "obliged." Instead of flowers or sweets, though, which she'd heard were obligatory, Reggie brought her a notebook. Embossed green cover, thick cream-colored paper inside that felt, beneath her fingertips, like a sort of crisp velvet. Two new, freshly sharpened pencils, too, that he laid on the tabletop between them.

"I thought you could write things in it," he explained, a little unnecessarily. "That you could use it for your equations and, what d'you call 'em, your theorems and things—"

She gave him a sharp look. "You know about my papers? You've read them?"

He laughed. "What? Me! Can't even do fractions without divine intervention."

"Then who told you I did maths? That I do maths?" 

He shrugged. "Nobody." 

She gave him a sharper look, and was disquieted to find he was quite sincere. "Then how did you know?"

He shrugged again, not the least self-conscious. "It's...just a sort of feeling I had. Watching you, and listening to you talk. Can't really explain it. D'you want the plaice or the haddock?"

That Saturday, they went to an art gallery. He didn't understand rotational symmetry or fractional recursion, not in the slightest, but he loved color and light and the whole idea of a mere piece of paper transformed, by a dedicated hand, into a windblown scrap of beauty. As he walked with her through the early modernists, in a jumper that was threadbare and moth-eaten but a lovely sky blue, he took her uninjured hand in his and, at the unexpected touch, her heart leapt up in her chest and beat palpably faster. She realized, suddenly, that the curve of his thumb meant he could feel her pulse, and in embarrassment she began to pull away. Then she stopped, and rested her fingers against his own wrist, and felt an answering, nervous thud of fear and hope.

They went to de Kooning. They went to Dürer. They went to Matisse. They went to a grotty, freezing café around the corner from the museum, and he held her hands in his across the table and somehow, of its own accord, the conversation quite naturally turned to when they would marry (soon) and how many children they wanted (several, why not?) and where and how they would live. Then they went to bed together in his grotty, freezing bedsit and Marian realized that at long last she, too, needed someone else, and that he needed her just as much, and possibly always would. Another thing for the Aunt Jeans of the world to hate her for, so just as well she'd told him all her own family was dead.

A few weeks later, when she realized she was pregnant, Reggie wasn't the slightest bit fussed; they both wanted a family, after all, so why not now? A few weeks after that, when she miscarried, they were both sad but not too sad, for they were young and this was just a bit of a glitch. She hadn't been knitting booties, anyway; the cream-colored notebook pages were already half full, with what would become the first draft of her first book. And despite all the bridges she'd happily burned, people would still make an inordinate fuss, every time she thought out loud in front of them. Reggie was terribly proud—he might have no inkling exactly what she'd done, to make him so proud, but his was the only fussing she actually liked.

Not long after their marriage, Marian was invited to deliver a paper at a conference (her academic cut-and-run now, apparently, reduced from shocking transgression to intriguing eccentricity) and, at the reception afterward, was accosted by a former colleague she'd nearly forgotten. Tall, striking, effortlessly good-humored and charming, he praised her presentation with a most scholarly lack of flattery, drawing her into a conversation about CMB anisotropies whose mutual intensity took her quite by surprise. Reggie, standing mute and uncomprehending at her elbow as he had all that afternoon (he'd insisted on coming, though she'd warned him), grew visibly sullen as he stared down at his untouched drink, and was in a brown study all the way home.

"That fellow," he said back inside the flat, before they'd both even removed their coats, "the tall one, I don't think I like you talking to him."

Marian blinked. Reggie wasn't at all a jealous man—and she'd never given him reason to be—so this sudden assertion of husbandly prerogatives was not just puzzling but annoying. "Paul's done some very important work in my field," she said, even more annoyed that she had to explain even this much. "There's no other reason I—"

"It's already 'Paul,' then, is it?" Reggie raked a hand through his hair, his habitual sign of agitation. "That's even worse."

"It's 'Paul' because I've known him since—" Marian broke off, feeling her annoyance start to curdle into anger. "Why on earth shouldn't I speak to him? What d'you think, I was flirting?"

"Of course not!" 

Marian flung herself onto the sofa, arms folded tense and tight against her chest. "You know what you sound like right now, Reg? Would you like to know? Like my aunt, when she'd get it in her nasty little brain that _I_ was after one of her disgusting men friends—"

"Marian." Reggie sat down next to her, his voice pleading but his eyes hard and stubborn. "Just, do this one for thing for me, will you, please? Talk to anyone else, anyone you like, but just...not him. Stay away from him."

"Just like her. You give me one reason why I shouldn't talk to him, one good reason—"

"I don't like his face, all right?" Reggie shouted. "I do not like his bloody face or his smiling or his handshake or his talk or anything else about him, that's why. He—Marian, he stinks. I mean, he's actually rank." Reggie had grabbed her hands, clutching them in his own as if physically dragging her away from Paul. "There's a poison inside him. I can smell it, like it's in his sweat, there's a stench coming off him, right under the surface, that...can't you sense it? At all?" 

When she just stared back, he clutched harder in impatience. "Come on, Marian! You're the brainbox here, can't _you_ feel how—look, he's a bad man, a rotten man, and I don't want you talking to him, and that's it. That's final. I—I forbid it." His grip slackened. "Please."

Marian yanked her hands away. "You are absolutely absurd," she said between clenched teeth, and stalked into the bedroom slamming the door hard behind her. Days of chilly sullenness followed, both of them slightly shocked at such bitter conflict, and over a third party no less, so early in their marriage; then, slowly, a thaw set in. Reggie never mentioned Paul's name again and Marian, for her part, decided he must have had some sort of actor's histrionic fit and graciously forgot it.

Months later, after the police raided Paul's flat, and after they rescued the young woman, barely alive, he'd been keeping in a box, and after the woman lived to testify against him, Marian made Spanish omelettes—Reggie's favorite tea—by way of apology, and had no appetite to finish any of hers. "I never imagined," she murmured, spearing a piece of potato and watching, indifferent, as it slid back off the fork. "Never, ever—"

"Well, I know," Reggie said, without rancor. "You wouldn't have thought I was barking or in a jealous rage if you did. That poor girl," he murmured, frowning, as he shoved that evening's newspaper aside in disgust. "They shouldn't put it all in the papers, what he did to her. It's not right."

"It was in the police report," Marian pointed out. "It's public record."

"So what? It's not entertainment, it's poison. Why does anyone need to know every last detail? Can't imagine the kind of mind that'd be fascinated by all that stuff." He shook his head. "That poor girl."

"She's alive, at least," Marian said. "Not like the other three before her." She pushed her plate aside. "Reg, how did you know? How? And don't say you can't explain it. Try."

"I told you that night," Reggie said. "The smell coming off him. The...the look of him." He ate another huge mouthful of omelette. "You know."

"Would I be asking you, if I knew? I saw him, everyone there saw him, we never—Reggie. All that." She nodded at the newspaper. "How could you possibly know that?"

"Well, I didn't know _that,_ I mean, what exactly he was up to. I'd have called the police myself. But...I knew there was something." 

He sighed, a sort of helpless confusion settling over his features: the same look he got whenever Marian (sometimes, solely because it amused her to see it) shared her most theoretical flights of fancy with him. "It's like I said, sometimes I just know things but I can't explain them. If you put me in front of him, I couldn't point to anything—I couldn't, when I really was in front of him. But I knew." He tapped his chest. "In here. Deep in here."

As he polished off the last of his eggs she gazed at him across the table. He'd somehow managed, she noted absently, to get HP sauce in his hair.

"About everyone?" she asked him. "That feeling, I mean?"

He shook his head. "Comes and goes. I don't know why. Some people are brick walls—perhaps I can figure out a few things about them, here and there, but otherwise they're just...unreadable. All contained in themselves. You're not going to finish that?"

She slid her plate toward him. "About me?"

He looked up, and smiled. "I get feelings about you all sorts of places," he said.

"I'm serious," she said. Which she was, though she was also smiling back. "About me?"

"Honest answer?" 

She nodded.

"You're the most beautiful brick wall I ever saw," he said. "And the most impossible to scale."

Marian thought this over, as he made short work of her remaining omelette. It would do, she decided. It would do.

******

_Someone_

"Never mind, love," Reggie said, taking her hand by the side of the hospital bed. "If at first we don't succeed, and all that."

This wasn't the first, though, that was the whole problem. It was the fifth—plus one awful menstrual period which, she now suspected, might have been a sixth—and the first doctor had offered them no hope at all and the second, a cockeyed optimist in comparison, had shook his head and told her not to hope for much. Reggie stubbornly refused to accept this, which he honestly seemed to mean as loving encouragement but left Marian feeling back in a different sort of classroom, standing before a teacher with kind eyes and good intent and no compunctions whatsoever, should she disappoint him, in failing her. Which wasn't fair, she knew it, because it was really she who was standing before herself, asking, _why? Why not this? Easiest thing in the world, any woman alive can do it whether she meant to or not...and I can't._

 _And when did it even become so important? When did I ever want to be just like everyone else?_

They had the means now for a child, for several children in fact. Reggie had got a play that was a surprise hit, and from that a small but steady role on a popular police series, and after Sergeant Springforth was messily killed off a few adverts that reaped, by their lights, an astonishing amount of money. People actually stopped him in the street, wanting stalwart Sam Springforth's or the MacEvoy Snacks dancing crisp's signature. Marian was terribly proud. There were no Falstaffs or Hamlets or Agamemnons in Reggie's future, and neither of them cared a whit. (Rudy, who had tired of the touring life and now taught secondary school drama, he might have had a Hamlet in him but, as he often said, he was holding out for a Lady Macbeth.) Her own work, as always, she could do from a nursery as easily as anywhere. Everything was ready. Except.

The day she came home from hospital, still surprised at how weak and tired she felt—although, as Reggie kept patiently reminding her, she had lost what even the doctors thought an alarming amount of blood—there was a card waiting for her, her name scrawled on the envelope with no return address. No postmark, either, someone must've just shoved it directly through the mail slot. A painting on the front, a riotous sprawl of candy-pink roses in full bloom, and in lavish script above them: 

_For You, On Your Mothering Sunday_

Her voice, when she called for Reggie, must've sounded how she felt because he ran into the room. As she sat in her chair feeling waves of heat and cold come and go, Reggie very calmly examined the card, and the envelope, and even poked at the mail slot like a mouth that might divulge whispered secrets.

"It's not any handwriting I know," he said, after a moment. He held the envelope before her to examine. "That aunt of yours?"

Of course, he'd worked out she'd lied to him and that Jean was alive and well. Probably right off. "Not her handwriting," she said. "Not her style either, she'd write ten solid pages about how all this serves me right for never appreciating her. And be proud to sign her name to it." She turned the card over, to hide the front. "Someone's idea of a joke, I suppose."

"Not mine," Reggie said, his face grim. He tore the card into strips of confetti.

Two weeks later, a second envelope arrived. No card this time, just a slip of typewritten paper: 

_He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful mother of children. Praise ye the LORD._

And a week later, a third:

_In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not._

"I'm angry now," Reggie said, softly, and did in fact call the police. They were sympathetic but offered little else. Rudy furiously denied any guilt—what sort of sick sadist did they think he was?—and neither Reggie nor she really suspected him, but who else knew enough about them to do this? Reggie had learned the hard way not to announce impending fatherhood, and as for her, she had no friends or family to announce herself to. The only other possibility was—

"The hospital," Reggie kept saying. "Remember that nurse, the blonde one with the big bum? She had it in for you, all that stuff about you malingering, remember we had to make a stink with the administrator—"

"Paul?" she interrupted. A mad idea, she knew, but she couldn't banish it from her mind.

He blinked in surprise, hearing the name. "Hadn't thought of that. Biggest sadist we know, though, isn't he?" He shook his head. "No postmark, though. Unless—unless he got someone to deliver it for him. One of those strange women who think they want to marry murderers—"

"It's possible," she said. "They say he's got quite a little fan club. But how would he know about this? And why would he care?" So strange, she thought, discussing all this sort of thing so dispassionately. Who could possibly keep it up, longer than a few minutes? "I'm going in circles. Don't you feel like it's anyone?" 

She put a hand to his arm, an involuntarily note of pleading creeping into her voice. "You know, haven't you...got a feeling, or anything, about who it might be?"

Reggie shook his head. His face, as he gazed down at his shoes, was furrowed in anxious shame, his own kind, well-intentioned internal teacher very much on the verge of sending him down.

A few months later, Marian got pregnant again. And stayed pregnant. Retching, ravenous, balloon-ankled pregnant. The doctor was surprised. Reggie was exuberant. 

"Didn't I tell you?" he kept saying, eyes dancing with excitement, as he pushed an ottoman beneath her feet and fetched innumerable cups of tea, the tinned mackerel with treacle she'd started to crave. "Didn't I?"

Indeed he had, just another of his inarticulate feelings. He was nearly dancing. She was merely happy, rather disbelievingly happy. Neither of them fretted over the actual delivery; of course that would go swimmingly. They'd got this far at long last, now hadn't they?

When she was nearly to term and—as she'd said to Reggie just that morning—feeling like a tick swimming in an Olympic pool of blood—a florist arrived at the flat bearing roses. Lovely, lavish pink roses, with no accompanying note. An exact replica, right down to the fluttering green ribbons, of the bouquet on the front of her anonymous card. Marian studied the roses for a long while, touching the edge of a petal as if it were diseased, then thrust them and their fluted glass vase deep into the recesses of the rubbish bin where Reggie wouldn't find them. She said nothing about it, to him or anyone else, and the nameless well-wishing stopped abruptly, and senselessly, as it began.

******

_Mycroft_

"So," Reggie would always cheerfully ask, when he phoned up on tour with a play, "the Midwich cuckoo made you drown yourself yet?"

"Honestly?" Marian would always say. "I'm tempted." 

Honestly, if Mike hadn't been the absolute spitting image of Aunt Jean (poor little bugger), Marian might have wondered at his provenance herself. As an infant in arms he certainly seemed ordinary enough—which was to say amazing, perfect, beautiful, every yawn and fart and waving punchdrunk fist a marvel in itself, all six or seven of their erstwhile children all contained in one—but when his first "word" was a precisely articulated demand for his rice cereal in the blue bowl because he _hated_ the orange one with the ducks, and when at three he was correcting errors in her most complex proofs she hadn't even detected, and when at five he was absorbed for hours on end teaching himself his fourth language, she had finally to admit to herself that she and Reggie were, very slightly, in over their heads. 

Sometimes, as Mike slept, Reggie or Marian would pass a gentle hand over his hair: the only time, now he was out of nappies, that he would tolerate their touch. They fed him, clothed him, gave him books and treatises and scientific equipment and tried not to feel hurt when he pushed them away, but what exact use they were to him, otherwise, she couldn't fathom any better than Reggie. A tiresome but inescapable stopgap until adulthood, was the obvious answer, but that was too dispiriting to contemplate.

"Suppose it's to be expected," Reggie would say, sometimes. "Remember when we were fourteen, fifteen and absolutely mad to get out of the house? He's just doing that earlier than other kids, too." 

"But he's not mad to get out of the _house,_ " Marian would point out. "Just away from us."

Which was the truth. Unless you counted burrowing into the labyrinth of books that was his bedroom, Mike didn't ever want to go anywhere—not to the grocer's (Marian's eyes did sometimes stray, a little wistfully, to the harassed mums with toddlers pulling boxes off any accessible shelf), not the park, not the playground or the fun fair or the art museum or the cinema or anywhere, at all, where there might be other people. The lending library, yes, occasionally, but more often than not he would simply present Marian with a long list of desired titles and then grow indignant when she observed, quite mildly, that if he wanted a dogsbody he could go hire one. He certainly had no friends, not even those strange children on the next block (whose mother—poor things—color-coded them, the oldest boy always dressed all in black and the youngest in blue and, well, Marian wasn't alone in avoiding her). Of course, unless you counted Miss Sherrinford she hadn't had friends either, but this just felt...different.

Or perhaps it wasn't. Had she really had any more use for other people—before Reggie, an ongoing lapse she still couldn't quite explain—than Mike did? He had his moments, after all, his own little lapses where he showed her a theorem he'd been laboring over with true childish pride, or suffered their taking him to the theater (he'd actually clutched her hand hard when the maenads fell screaming on Pentheus with teeth and nails, before he remembered himself and yanked it away), or lingered while Reggie played his records (Mike had a surprising taste for the Crystals and Shirelles). That such moments were separated by long stretches of indifference bordering on contempt, well, at least the moments actually occurred, and were just as much part of Mike's small, frankly strange psychology as the sharp little tongue and far sharper eye.

They'd tried employing tutors, within the limits of their finances, and Marian had hopes for this beyond the academic. Who said his friends had to be his own age, after all? Surely one of them would prove another Miss Sherrinford, the mentor, the confidant to lead their son where neither of them could follow. It didn't happen. The closest Mike ever came to an intimate exchange with any of them was baiting them, gleefully, into exiting the house in a blind rage; after the seventh, Marian gave up.

"He's going to wish us both into a cornfield one of these days," Reggie said, not entirely lightheartedly. "And with that brain, he could invent a way to actually do it."

"Don't be daft," Marian said, not entirely unsympathetically. "You make him sound positively hateful, and he's not. He's just—" She sighed. "Rather like me, at that age, except rather a bit more of a prat."

She did not like this sensation, of being made to feel any sort of affinity whatsoever with Aunt Jean. She did not like or appreciate it at all.

"Just tell me I've got to do whatever it is you're making me do because you're Mummy and Daddy, and that's that," Mike said one day, after he threatened to run away if they tried taking him on holiday and a fierce donnybrook erupted. "I hate it when you try to make it all some battle of wits. You _can't_ win." He glanced across the kitchen table. "Daddy especially."

The words were all Mike but the tearful frustration was any child his age, any at all. What were they meant to do in the face of that? Marian glanced at Reggie and his expression told her he, like her, had decided there was nothing in the Dordogne worth all this _Sturm und Drang._

"All your mum said," Reggie replied, a little wearily, "was there might be other children there. So just say you hate other kids and that's that, did you really think we didn't know? We're both three planks thick, fine, but we've worked that much out—"

"I don't hate them," Mike said, actually bristling a little as he mopped his eyes. "I just—I'm _supremely_ disinterested in them. All right? And there are plenty of pictures of mountains and castles in books. Why can't you just leave me alone with my books?"

"That's all we ever do," Reggie said, sighing, to Mike's empty chair, after Mike exited the table in a new paroxysm of tears. They did mend fences the next day, Marian was happy to see. Reggie mentioned his casting in a new play about Alan Turing, and that led to a perfectly civil, even animated discussion of cryptography; Reggie listened with interest to Mike's and Marian's shop talk (as he always did), and when Mike explained himself to Reggie, it was with some actual patience and tact (which he rarely had). The ice, while not entirely broken, had at least thawed a little.

The following week, when she actually succeeded in dragging Mike with her to the library, Marian was browsing the nineteenth century novels (she'd always been indifferent to fiction, but then Reggie played Mr. Jellyby in a miniseries and she'd got curious about Dickens and all the rest) and suddenly realized Mike was nowhere to be seen. Not particularly worried—whatever he threatened, his idea of running away was sulking in a corner with Schopenhauer—she went to the maths shelves, then natural sciences, then poetry because, well, you never knew, and then finally found him in, yes, philosophy. 

Several thick, heavy volumes already piled at his feet, Mike was reaching up on tiptoe for another when, suddenly, he froze. A man was approaching the same shelves, accompanied by a boy and girl just about Mike's age chattering at, presumably, their father and being gently shushed. Mike, seeing the other children before they saw him, abandoned his horde and ducked into the next, deserted aisle of shelves, waiting out the man's search for the title written—illegibly, the man complained aloud—on a small slip of paper. Marian, watching her son watch the trio through a gap in the book spines, didn't see hatred in his expression, or scorn, or lofty indifference. What she saw instead was a contained, cool avidity that seemed to have nothing to do with actual interest, or shyness, or any sort of hunger for human contact. Like—the thought came to her, unbidden—like a thief, who'd stumbled over a display of beautifully wrought jeweled rings and was assessing, indifferent to their craftsmanship, the value of each individual stone.

She waited until the man found his own book and led his children away, then picked up Mike's undisturbed selections from the floor. Mike came back around the corner, into the aisle with her.

"The Mackie with the red cover," she asked, nodding toward the shelves. "Is that the one?"

He nodded, and she pulled it down. 

"Why were you hiding?" she asked him, not really expecting an answer.

"I wasn't hiding," he said, only a little impatiently. "I was watching."

Marian thought this over. "Didn't you say," she reminded him, "that you're 'supremely disinterested' in everyone else? So what's to watch, then?" 

Mike didn't answer for a moment; not, it seemed, from thinking the question unworthy, but from a desire to phrase himself precisely as he could. "People are always...giving themselves away, aren't they, in the smallest sorts of ways, without even realizing it? I like to keep track of all that, and file it away in my head." He sounded almost confiding, as if he had actually long wished to be asked this so he could impress her with the answer. "So that they don't see me, but I see just what I want to see from them."

"Tallying up everyone's little moments of weakness?"

He shrugged. "If you must put it that way, Mummy."

"What for?"

He just looked at her, in that lofty, disappointed way that said she should have long since worked out the answer, but that he'd known she wouldn't. Of course, he looked at her that way a good twenty times a day.

"In that case," she said, "I don't know why you want to stay inside all the time, when you could be out observing everyone around you all the—"

"There are these things called windows, Mummy," he said, with a parodic sort of patience, as he examined his horde of books. "You look through them, when it's necessary, and otherwise get left blessedly alone."

Clearly, the conversation was meant to be at an end, but Marian couldn't quite let it drop. "And what if," she asked, "someone's watching the watcher?"

"They aren't," he said. "And if they are, they're too stupid to know what they're seeing—"

"But what if, hypothetically, they weren't?" She held the red volume out to him, to add to the pile. "What if somewhere, here or on the other side of the globe, just one other person had been born as smart as you, or smarter—it's happened, you know—and they just happen to run into you, somewhere, and they see in you exactly what _they_ want to see? And then...well, they've got you?" She folded her arms, contemplating the scenario herself. "What would you do?"

Mike shook his head, now thoroughly disgusted. "Yes, yes, more of the bloody boring Golden Rule, what a terrible way to behave and how would I like it if someone else did the same to—"

"That is not what I'm saying," she retorted, indignant in turn. "It's an honest question, and not a rhetorical one either. If that happened, _if_ it did, then what would you do?"

Mike thought about it. And thought about it some more. Finally, after several silent minutes, he looked up at her.

"I don't know," he said.

His words, his expression, carried a surprise he didn't try to hide: someone, and not this hypothetical, chimerical Someone, had asked him a question which _he_ had never before considered, and to which he genuinely had no answer. Mike shifted the books in his grasp, settling them more comfortably in his arms, and looked up at his mother in something that threatened, from a very long way away, to approach...not respect, really, not even the grudging sort, but at least a tacit admission. _Well, you got me there._

They checked out their books and drove home in what felt an unusually harmonious silence.

******

_William_

"For heaven's sake, old chap," Reggie told Mycroft (who shouted now if they called him Mike, which didn't always stop them from doing it), with undisguised exasperation. "Could you at least _try_ not plaguing your mum so much, just for a little while longer? At least until she's actually had the baby?"

Mycroft's face slackened with undisguised shock. He glanced in disbelief toward Marian, then his father, then back to Marian again.

"I thought," he finally muttered, subdued by his own deductive failings, "that you were just getting fat."

Reggie shook his head. "How many times have I told you you're going to have a little brother or sister? Dozens? Hundreds?"

"You know I never listen to either of you if I can help it," Mycroft said. 

This was indisputable, so Reggie shrugged and Marian ate another helping of her newest craving, steak tartare with bananas. 

Despite this moment of truth, when Marian returned from hospital and he saw the indisputable, wriggling blue blanket of evidence, Mycroft still looked gobsmacked. He gazed down at it, then at Marian, in a welter of righteous indignation.

"Why have you done this?" he demanded of his mother. "What possessed you?"

William started to cry, the thin meandering wail of any newborn, and Mycroft stalked away in disgust and slammed his bedroom door. 

In the ensuing weeks, as William learned to hold up his head, Reggie happily took nighttime bottle shifts (this son, surely, would be the one with any earthly use for him), and Marian finally used up the last of the beef mince, Mycroft maintained a stony, wounded silence. Every now and then he would speak, quite loudly, of his newest proof or linguistic acquisition, and Marian or Reggie would pay heed just as before—but when William's crying or crapping or spitting up (he had, Reggie agreed, an unholy projectile range) interrupted the proceedings, Mycroft would throw down his fork and demand dinner in his room, forever after. One morning, Marian awoke to find William removed, in his infant seat, to the farthest corner of the cellar. William didn't seem to mind—he put up loud protest when separated from the cobwebs he was gleefully tearing to shreds—but Marian, as she told Mycroft at many more decibels than usual, had had enough.

"He's _your_ little brother!" she shouted.

"He's an imbecile," Mycroft said, watching with a jaundiced eye as William gummed a teething ring, and the ear of a teddy bear, and the corner of a library book. "I mean, look at him."

"You were exactly the same at that age, Clever Hans, and frankly sometimes I miss it. Or did you think you came out of the womb clutching Cicero in your fist—"

"Don't talk about wombs and things," pleaded Mycroft, his hands to his ears. "It's disgusting."

"You're going to hear about every twist and turn of the Fallopian tube if you ever do anything like this again, do you understand me? He is your brother, your little brother. He will always be younger than you. He might actually need you someday, God help him—"

"For _what?_ " Mycroft demanded, in outraged disbelief. 

"How should I know what? That's not the point! Someday—" She sighed. "Someday, your father and I won't be here, and he'll be all the family you've got left. And all he's got left. And whatever you think now, when the time comes, that might actually matter."

William, as if feeling left out of the conversation, contributed a stream of disjointed babble. Mycroft listened in distaste, then shook his head.

"Sorry, Mummy," he said, "but he's yours. Not mine." He made a show of resuming his book. "Though if you're going to fuss about it, I suppose he can stay upstairs."

Marian, too frustrated to continue, swept William up and retreated to the back room.

Mycroft learned Norwegian. William learned to roll over. Marian began writing her fourth treatise. On the way back down the hall to retrieve another notebook, she peered into the nursery and found William, whom she'd put down for his nap, wide awake. Nothing unusual in that—he could contentedly stare at the world around him for long, quiet stretches—but what was highly unusual was that Mycroft was standing before William's cot. Not attempting to remove his brother from it, but simply staring back.

Whether Mycroft noticed her presence or not, he kept his attentions on William. He frowned in concentration, knitting his small brow and tilting his head this way and that as if, by so doing, he might finally fit William's existence into some logical pattern. William lay on his stomach watching Mycroft, one fat hand gripping the cot bars. Mycroft came closer, standing directly over him, and when they were only inches apart suddenly clenched his jaw and twisted his face into an angry carnival mask.

William laughed.

At the sound of it Mycroft's mask slipped, and he actually took a step back in confusion. Another, even more grotesque face. William laughed again. Mycroft considered this at length; then he took several steps back, re-approached the cot at a run and brandished bared teeth, bug eyes and clenched-claw fingers in unhinged fury.

 _"Gyyyaaaaaaaggggghhhhh!"_ he screamed, at the top of his lungs, straight into William's face.

Bouncing up and down where he lay, William shrieked with mirth. Mycroft stood there, astonished, clearly at a loss what to do next. Marian, retreating in a certain confusion of her own, turned and nearly collided with Reggie, whom she hadn't heard walk up behind her. They both maintained a strict quiet until they were well out of earshot.

"Well, well," Reggie said, looking thoughtful. Then he picked up the pad and pen they kept by the phone.

"What are you writing, dear?" Marian asked, after a few moments.

"My will," he said. "When they both band together and kill us in the night, I want Rudy to have my green armchair."

******

_Redbeard_

"I know it's awful," Reggie kept saying. "I do, I cried so hard after Lacey, my dog, got hit by a car—but there wasn't anything to be done, William. You heard the vet—" 

"They can treat cancer," William said, scrubbing his eyes with his sleeve as fresh tears rolled down his face; he was actually letting Reggie hold him on his knees, a sign of just how far lost in misery he was. "You said, I heard you, Granddad had it, they treated it and he got better—"

"But not when it's in your bones, and your liver, and everywhere in your body, not then. Not like with Redbeard. And it's not as easy as that, treatment hurts, and he'd be exhausted and sick all the time and couldn't run and play. You didn't want him to suffer, did you? He was already suffering. You saw it." Reggie looked terribly sad himself—he'd loved Redbeard too, for all he never called him anything but _that smelly rag mop always flopping at Billy's feet_ —but he was William's first and foremost and William was, and remained, utterly inconsolable. "Animals don't understand suffering. That's why it's our duty to end it for them, when we can. As soon as we can."

He put an arm around William's shoulder. "It's awful now, but it won't be forever. You'll remember him, always, and when you get another dog—" 

"Why would you even—I don't ever want another dog. Ever! Not ever!" William pulled himself free, standing before his parents swollen-eyed and shaking with fury. "I want _my_ dog and you killed him and you don't even care he's dead and now he's gone there's nobody on my side. There's nobody—" 

As he ran sobbing from the room Marian got up to follow him, but Reggie shook his head.

"Leave him be," he said. "It's normal. He'll get past it."

That, Marian thought, was a matter of opinion. He did, after the first few days, stop crying—in fact, he never mentioned Redbeard again, and the few times Reggie or Marian tentatively brought up the subject, he turned tight-lipped and left the room. Mycroft, of course, felt it his duty to scorn the soppy sentimentality out of his brother. Patiently, he cited the growth patterns of canine osteosarcomas and the precise side effects of doxorubicin and Redbeard's statistical unlikelihood, even in the best of health, ever to have witnessed William's own tenth birthday, until William finally flew into a rage and, by the time Reggie and Marian were able to pull him away, was valiantly attempting to bite off part of Mycroft's ear. (As this wasn't the first, second or nineteenth time they'd come to such an impasse—and neither brother ever seemed to appreciate their peace initiatives—they let it be after that.) They did finally get another dog, a black bull terrier who, to unanimous bewilderment, seemed to adore Mycroft most of all, but William was indifferent to her and the feeling appeared mutual.

"Come on, then," Reggie would attempt, whenever William was in the vicinity, "let's take Tessa for a walk, the two of us. How about it? She'd love to just roam about, like you used to do all the time with—"

"I'm busy," William would say every time, giving Tessa a sour look. "I've got bloody homework. You're the ones who couldn't stop blithering about sending me to a proper school, never mind Mycroft gets to stay here—"

"No, _you_ blithered for it," Reggie would point out, not unkindly, every time. "To get away from him breathing down your neck, you said. Over and over and over again."

"Didn't work," William muttered, on his way back to his room. "He still finds out everything, no matter what. He'd find it out if I were in—" He searched his mind for some godforsaken hiding place. "—in Florida."

Tessa, apparently sensing some slight against her favorite human, yanked on her leash and growled until Reggie bundled her outside. 

Marian, for her part, had never been certain school and other children were the right decision. There were...incidents, sometimes, where William didn't strictly speaking come home in tears but had, quite definitely, been crying at some point. Or where he came home looking scuffed, like a worn shoe. Every time she or Reggie tried to intervene, though, he furiously brushed them aside and insisted that he was fine, everything was fine, no he did _not_ want to go back to her teaching him, not for anything. They tried to remain hands-off, since he as good as demanded it, but children just seemed to have become crueler since she was young. Or perhaps it was different for boys.

"Am I a freak?" he asked her once, out of nowhere, when both Mycroft and his father were out of earshot. Under his breath, not meeting her eyes.

"Absolutely not," she said without hesitation, and he seemed satisfied.

"Am I an insufferable arse?" he asked her another time, out of nowhere, but looking her in the eye and sounding merely curious.

"Sometimes," she said, after some consideration, and he didn't seem disturbed.

One Saturday, apparently just to be contrary, William said that yes, all right, he would go with them and the bloody piss factory (his only appellation for Tessa, who always growled as if she understood him) if it'd stop them fussing and carrying on, _for once._ William trailing sullenly behind them, they headed down the long, sloping hill that led to the park, Tessa running in excited little circles off her leash and Marian enjoying the fresh cool air; it had been inordinately hot nearly all of September, and this bit of bracing wind was a relief. She let her thoughts wander back and forth, move in increasingly rapid circles as they tended to do when she was outside with no particular destination. Reggie, who after so long knew what he called her "knotty-pine problem" look at a glance, tended to his own thoughts, his only sounds the occasional chuck or whistle to bring Tessa back to heel. William dragged his feet, as if he himself were being pulled by a leash. Vaguely, at the far edge of her consciousness, Marian was aware of a small, compact black shape that kept darting toward one particular spot in the grass and back again, repeatedly, as if something terribly interesting were—

"Oh, Jesus!" Reggie cried.

Marian, yanked back to the here and now, looked wildly around her—was William hurt? Or Reggie? Then she saw it, not ten feet away. The body lay face down in an isolated cluster of tall grass, no way to tell age or sex but far too small to be an adult; the arms were outstretched and the palms lay flat, as if clinging to and supplicating the earth for help. The lower half of the body was covered by a torn clump of carpeting soaked in mud, or blood, or both; the upper half was bare, its skin livid and swollen and giving off a ripe, smothering smell. Through the filthy, matted hair, flies crawled. On the grass beneath, insects seethed. The clutching fingernails were visibly loose in their softened, purplish beds.

Tessa wagged her tail and barked in ecstasy.

William, now at Marian's side, breathed in sharply. As if his invisible leash were being slowly reeled in, he took a step forward, then another, and another, and was still utterly mesmerized by the corpse and its stench when the police finally arrived. Fascinated shock was a natural reaction, the officers assured them after taking their statements. While Reggie, thoroughly shaken, took them at their word, Marian—who finally had to drag William physically away from the scene, and listen to his recriminations for hours—had her doubts. Which was to say, she knew her younger son well enough, better than she'd ever understood the elder, and (thanks, on occasion, to the elder) she knew what he looked like when he was distraught, or sad, or afraid. This wasn't that. If she mentally stripped all context from the horrible, sickening scene, if she considered the look on her son's face as objectively, as abstractly as possible, she knew what she saw in his eyes, gazing down at that poor dead little boy or girl. She saw not just fascination, but infatuation. She saw enthrallment. She saw...love.

(What, exactly, was she meant to do with this knowledge? Well, she certainly wasn't telling Reggie. The poor man was playing Kent—or was it Albany?—in seven weeks' time, he was horribly nervous and already had enough on his mind. It was the way William's hands had clenched and unclenched at the sight, the way he seemed to want to breathe in the awful sight and smell of it forever, and she knew he knew how awful it was but at the same time, the very same...honestly? No, actually, she didn't know what she knew. Other than that she was not saying one word to Reggie.)

"Why couldn't I stay?" William demanded, incessantly, for days on end, while Mycroft rolled his eyes and, when he imagined nobody was watching, dropped Tessa bits of steak. "I'm a witness, I was right there at the scene before they ever got there, and policemen are utterly stupid. They're always missing key evidence. I could solve it, without them—"

"You?" Mycroft snorted. "You're so thick, you can't even go a round of deductions without your brains leaking through your ears. You _always_ get it wrong. Always. Even when I take pity and actually try to throw the game in your favor."

"I do not!" William shouted. "I am not thick, Mummy, tell him I'm not thick!"

Marian sighed. She and Reggie had been happy, once, to see the boys actually sitting down together over a chessboard or a logic puzzle or this "deductions" invention of Mycroft's—even if, to her mind as well as Reggie's, it seemed merely a far more punishing I Spy—but it all had long since grown very tedious. "Your brother is not thick," she told Mycroft. "Not in the slightest, as you know perfectly well. So stop it."

"And Father Christmas is real and fairies do the housecleaning and Mummy and Daddy will always keep the monsters away," Mycroft drawled, in utter boredom. "Anything to soothe the baby, but that doesn't make it true."

William flushed to the roots of his hair, falling silent for several minutes. 

"I could do it," he said again, stubbornly. "I could catch the killer." 

"Could we please talk about something else?" Reggie asked from the depths of the green armchair, where he'd abandoned all pretense of studying his script. "Anything? I see it every time I close my eyes."

"Then you should be glad someone wants to catch him!" 

"I am," Reggie replied. "I am glad someone wants to. The police want to and the mayor wants to, quite badly, judging by the news. So let them do their jobs, because they will do their jobs—"

"Yes, quite badly, that's my point." William's hand snaked into his hair, tugging hard in frustration; he'd done that since he was small, scaring them in one of his frequent toddler rages by tearing away a whole, bloody tuft. "Why doesn't anyone listen to me, ever, when I—shut up," he snapped at Mycroft, as the latter opened his mouth for another riposte. "I saw it all, the scene and, and the little mistakes the killer made, what he—"

"Or she," Mycroft offered, not terribly interested, as he proofread his mother's latest draft.

"Not _she,_ not she, the killer's so obviously a man, a short man, chews violet pastilles but absolutely stinks of Woodbines, it was written all over the crime scene, this is exactly what I'm talking about!" William's teeth ground together, face gone scarlet again in exasperation. "None of you can even see—I'm going over there," he declared. "Their address was on the telly, I'm going to talk to her dad and her sister, I can find out all sorts of things without the police and their idiot meddling—"

"No." Reggie, his script now forgotten, rose to his feet and stood over his son. "No. You absolutely will not."

"No," Marian agreed, before the inevitable appeal. "Out of the question."

William gazed from one to the other of them, seeking the crack in the facade. "Yes, I am," he said.

"No," Reggie said. "No. Unless you want to spend the next six months under total house arrest, you will not."

That this was to be the end of the conversation was, clearly, rather a shock. William glared at his father, turned to his mother expecting a last-minute reprieve and, when he didn't get it, just sat there in beetroot-faced disbelief. His teeth ground audibly.

"Why not?" he demanded, his voice rising with each new syllable. He rose in turn, as if preparing to propel himself out the nearest window and toward the waiting bereaved. "Why? Why not? _Why bloody not?_ "

"Why?" Reggie had him by the upper arms; not a tight grip, but strong enough that William was forced to stand still and look into his eyes. "You're not just throwing one of your strops, you really want to know why? Remember them on the telly, the father and sister, crying fit to break their hearts? Because _she is their Redbeard,_ that's why not." Reggie brought his face closer. "Does that make any damned sense to you? At all? Or would you like it if some total stranger came along and took away Redbeard's ashes to sift through and his collar you keep in that special box and made you talk about what it felt like watching him sicken and die, over and over again? And made out it might really be all your fault, because you didn't watch him or feed him or love him enough? Would you like that? Would you appreciate their _efforts,_ if someone came to our door, right now, and did that to you?"

William, shocked, gave no answer. He pulled his arms free as his father's grasp loosened, but didn't stalk off or turn his back. Reggie, his eyes still sparking, saw the impact of the words and gave William an awkward pat on the shoulder; then, taken aback by his own outburst, he sat back in his chair, picked up his script and tried, clumsily, to find where he'd lost his place. Mycroft, bored with the whole contretemps, was too absorbed in his editorial work to comment. William stood there, a look of intense thoughtfulness spreading across his face.

"Oh," he finally said, as if an entirely new, unprecedented idea had just occurred to him. 

Tessa sniffed around William's feet, content to be ignored as usual. He seemed to have grown to tolerate her, at least, in the past few days, the only one among them who'd shared his joy at the discovery. Marian took Mycroft's pages, scribbled with corrections like a graffiti-covered toilet wall, and held her tongue.

 _You should be glad._ Marian was. She was very glad he wanted to _catch_ the killer.

******

_Sherrinford_

He had a full, feathery head of black hair, Reggie's hair. Marian's nose, plain as day on that impossibly small face. His minute hands had minutely long fingers and toes, just like William had had. Reggie's jaw. His grandfather's chin. He was small, and he was perfect, and he was born dead. 

She knew Reggie blamed himself. It had been he who broached, so tentatively, letting the accidental arrival go ahead and arrive, and she had assented without hesitation because fortune had smiled on them twice, now hadn't it, why not a third? Hadn't her deliveries been so easy, compared to the conception and carrying? Hadn't they always wanted more children? She'd never really got around to telling the boys—no point, considering the aggravation—but as her body broadened and widened William looked her up and down and then looked away without comment, plain old garden-variety adolescent embarrassment. Mycroft, now far too immersed in...whatever it was he did even to pretend to care what went on at home, observed the evidence on one of his increasingly rare visits and gave a single, contemptuous snort.

"Shouldn't you be well past all that?" he said, with an air of disdain. "At your ages?"

"Steady on, old chap," Reggie said.

"If those diminishing returns keep up," Mycroft remarked as if no one had spoken, eyes flickering over to his brother, "you'll have a genuine drooling idiot on your hands, not just a comparative one. Your loss, of course, but I'd have stopped while I could still occasionally pretend I was ahead." He smiled at William. "Very occasionally."

William scowled, but said nothing back. Mycroft departed again for...wherever he went, to do whatever he did. And everything had gone swimmingly well, unprecedentedly well, until it hadn't.

Reggie blamed himself, for everything, but he was a mercy. He kept his self-recriminations to himself, sparing her having to reassure and cosset him. While she was still in hospital he returned the nursery back to a mere spare room, and though she often saw him with reddened, shadowed eyes he cooked their meals and answered condolences and kept a determined, resolute peace, without the false good cheer that, just then, she felt could have killed her. William, for his part, remained silent. Whether he truly couldn't grasp their emotions or whether, like nearly everyone else, he simply had no idea what to say, Marian didn't know. Or, just then, really care.

There was a gray scrim over everything, a sort of pervasive mist that leached the flavor from food, killed other appetites, clouded thought, dimmed light. It got into her lungs, shortening her breath and tightening her chest to cracking point without ever offering the relief of tears. The hours passed with shocking speed and yet, at the same time, slowed to a minute-by-minute crawl that, with every new morning, filled her with the dread of another endless, unrelenting day trudging through the stone-colored fog. She wanted to become stone, to be a dry thing inside and out that cracked and crumbled and eroded, little by little, to nonexistence. No. She already was that thing; she'd just been allowed to imagine, for a few brief years of respite, that she was flesh and blood.

The day to day of each endless day went on. She saw William off to school. She resumed the cooking from Reggie, telling him truthfully she needed something to do. She sat in her favorite chair looking out over the back garden, the one where she would go to think through proofs or Fourier transforms or—whatever she used to think about. The gray scrim kept her removed from all of that. What she thought about now, she couldn't quite say even as she was thinking it. She patted Reggie's arm and told him not to worry, everything was really all right, and that worried Reggie most of all. 

William, day to day, still said nothing.

Negotiating the fog, no matter it was a really a sunny spring day, she drove slowly home from the shops. William had accompanied her, something or other he needed for school—he'd told her three times and she still couldn't remember, until he sighed with impatience and said he'd come with her and fetch it himself—and as they slowed and stopped for a red light he drummed his fingertips against the window glass. Restless, twitchy, but that was nothing new. He twisted around in his seat and she felt his gaze, but didn't turn her head.

"So where's Mycroft, anyway?" he demanded, out of nowhere. 

"Busy," Marian said. She didn't know any more than that, but then, she never really had.

"He should come home," William said. He stared back out the window. "I told him he should come home, so he can talk to you—"

"About what?" Marian glanced at him. "Talk to me about what?"

"All of this stuff about the baby."

How bloody long was this traffic light, anyway? Marian's fingers tightened on the steering wheel. "What exactly," she asked, "would he have to tell me about that?"

"Well, he was right in a way, wasn't he?" William said. He straightened in his seat, his drum-hand drumming faster. "I mean, the thing about diminishing returns—you're both so torn up but it's not as if one of us suddenly died after all this time, or even like it was walking and talking and acting like a proper human being and then, something happened." There was a peevish quality to his voice, as if his parents were deliberately withholding some vital piece of information solely to be selfish. "It wasn't even a real baby, ever, it was just...dead, without any life behind it. From the very start. So getting so upset about it, I don't understand it."

The scrim that was meant to protect her, the thick grayness shrouding her from feeling anything, had torn open like skin and was seeping blood. It, she thought. It. It.

"I hope this light turns green soon," she said. "Very soon. Because I absolutely can't stand being in this car with you any longer."

He stared at her, stunned. "But what did I—"

"Do you remember," she asked, as the light finally turned green and she sped through the intersection, "how you used to just cry and cry, when your brother would call you stupid, and we had to tell you over and over we _weren't_ cross with you and _didn't_ hate you? Well, sometimes I think I'd rather have had the two stupidest children who ever lived, if either of them had the slightest kindness in them, any understanding of the rest of the human race—but you and your brother, you've got no bloody use for anyone but each other, and really not even that, and you always say such horrible things. Always. Always." She shook her head, smiling somehow, a painful rictus. "Always."

She was trembling, for some reason, and her cheeks felt oddly damp. William seemed to be saying something, but she couldn't seem to hear anything but the whoosh of the traffic and a roaring in her ears; as they pulled up to the house she nearly leapt from the car and, not waiting for William to emerge, went inside and to bed for the rest of the day. And stayed in bed the next day, and all the days after. There was no point in getting up: Reggie would manage, he wasn't a child, and her own children had never needed her anyway, not for anything. She lay there, drifting between waking and sleep without fully embracing either one, and concentrated on thinking nothing at all. 

Mycroft came by, once, while Marian was sleeping or half-sleeping. Reggie told her afterward but didn't wake her for it, and she was glad.

Time passed; how much, she'd stopped noticing. Reggie brought her soup, toasted cheese, and she forced it down so she wouldn't worry him. He sat with her, holding her hand, quietly urging doctors, medicine, maybe a bit of a walk might help, and she said nothing. She couldn't let him play nursemaid forever; he had a movie part, a good one, that started shooting in Hungary soon, and it took what little stamina she had left to convince him not to back out of it. Yes, she would eat. Yes, she would be fine, really, truly, if only he would leave her alone. She wasn't angry at him—far from it, thank God he had Rudy and apparently, on the film set, a fellow actor who did a lot of fundraising for crib death research to talk to, because he'd grown thin and anxious and she was worried. But her worry couldn't reach through to him; somehow, she'd lost nearly all her words. They dropped off her consciousness before they could even take form, as if from the edge of a high, stony cliff.

She dreamed, half-dreamed, that she was lying on the beach, fully clothed on her back in darkened wet sand and with the waters closing over her every time the tide came in. It wasn't a nightmare, she wasn't drowning; she lay still each time she was submerged, wondering with calm curiosity when she would finally be pulled loose and out to sea. Then, still stretched out, she was floating upward, like the girl in a magician's act seeming to hover in the air. The waters rose with her, a literal seabed, and where she had thought to drown she now waited for oblivion in the endless gray banks of clouds covering, obscuring the sky—

—and she woke up, to a strange sight. William, sitting in a chair by her bedside, absorbed in a book about François l'Olonnais. She pulled herself higher on the pillows, and at that faint sound he looked up. They studied each other.

"You're meant to be in school," she reminded him. Her voice, from so little speaking, came out in a croak.

"Boring," he said.

She couldn't argue with that. "And this isn't?" 

He shrugged. Over the past months he'd shed the last of the baby fat, becoming as jutting-elbow skinny as his brother wasn't; his hair had darkened, nearly as dark now as Reggie's, and the once or twice a year he smiled Marian had sudden, disturbing flashes of the face from her stolen photograph. 

"Do you want me to leave?" he asked, in an entirely even, neutral tone.

"Not unless you're bored," she said. "Is it an interesting book?"

"Not this chapter." He leafed through it impatiently. "All sorts of blather about pirates' concubines and things. The parts about looting ships and torture are a lot more interesting."

"I think they counted women as a large part of the loot," she pointed out. "And boys your age."

"They also believed in homunculi and herbal horoscopes, so what did they know." He closed the book, keeping a finger against the page. "He got cannibalized in Panama. Torn limb from limb while he was still alive and then eaten by native tribes."

"Did he deserve it?" 

William considered the question, then nodded. 

"Dad's sleeping," he volunteered. "Downstairs."

Marian turned onto her side, drawing up her knees. "I think I'll rest my eyes a bit too."

"All right," he said, and resumed his book. She fell asleep to the sound of rustling paper.

He sat there the next day, and the day after, and the day after. Reggie, who had to be persuaded again and yet again Marian could safely be left alone, didn't try sending him to school—or even mention school—and when a stern letter arrived from the headmaster he threw it away unread. He departed for Budapest. William remained upstairs. A few days later, without any forethought or ceremony, Marian sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. William looked up, startled, from a book about renegade Mormons.

"Perhaps your father was right," she said. "A bit of a walk. Want to come with me?" 

Oddly, he said he did.

Their neighborhood was always quiet but today it seemed positively deserted, like one of those silly stories about bombs that vaporized living things but left the buildings all intact. Even the pavement under her feet felt unfamiliar, as if she'd been away for years. As they crossed the street Marian saw a flash of crimson and swiftly ducked her head, as if she could thus evade the view of the woman now coming straight toward them wheeling a gleaming, expensive pram. Too late. As the pram slowed and stopped Marian composed her face into, she hoped, a friendly-seeming arrangement.

"Marian!" the woman exclaimed, as if she hadn't recognized her and William from twenty yards off. "My God, we haven't seen you in _ages,_ have we?"

"Hello, Joanna," Marian said. "I don't suppose you have."

The pram was carefully angled in repose, as if Joanna—whom Marian had known, vaguely, since university, and formally detested—was expecting and inviting glances inside. Of course, she was. Marian obediently bent forward, examining the plump, perfect sleeping baby in its spotless lacy white, then gazed back up at Joanna. Perfect flax-blonde hair, perfect skin perfectly made up, perfect clothes, perfect slim supple body with not an ounce of baby weight. Joanna lived in a perfectly restored single-family detached several prosperous streets away, had got pregnant nearly the same time as Marian, had only just had this perfect baby girl now out for her airing on, presumably, the perfect nanny's or au pair's day off. Of all the gin joints in all the world. William, not so patiently waiting out this whole needless exchange, was staring past them at a clump of trees.

"She's lovely," said Marian. Not a lie, anyhow. "Poppy, is that her name?"

"Imogen," Joanna corrected her, a little singsong in her voice as if the baby were listening. "Henry changed his mind at the last moment, silly man." She reached down, laying a perfectly manicured hand gently against Imogen's cheek, then looked up again with a little fluttering sigh. "Of course, it's a madhouse now with her and the twins, but we do our best. Marian, I'm so sorry Henry and I were a bit out of commission when you and Ronnie were, er—"

"Reggie," Marian interrupted. "Well, it's a busy time, isn't it. Right after they arrive."

"Oh, _isn't_ it?" Joanna shook her head, so relieved to run into someone who understood so well. "But believe me, every time I pick up Imogen I think about what you must have gone through and it just shatters my heart." Her voice, briefly ubiquitous in radio plays and voice-over adverts before she'd retired into motherhood, dropped into its lowest, plummiest register of tragic sympathy. "I mean it, Marian. It shatters my heart."

She actually laid a hand to her breastbone, dropping her chin as if to hide tears. William let out a loud snort, which made Joanna jump; she blinked a few times, metaphorically slapped back into consciousness, then studied him up and down. He gazed back without expression.

"So," she asked, in a teasing tone really not on, Marian thought, for addressing a boy barely thirteen. "How are _you,_ William? Plugging away at your schoolwork like you should be?"

He let the silence, and his unblinking stare, endure just long enough that Joanna shifted from foot to foot, looking vaguely uncomfortable. Marian did not rescue her. "I'm not in school just now," he finally said. "I read."

"You read! Really! The way you say that, you might've invented it." Joanna brushed a shiny lock of hair behind her ear; then, under his continuing gaze, she plucked at her cashmere jumper's neckline as if worried it had slipped. "Just like your older brother then, are you? What do you read about? Maths? I know you always kept insisting there's some sort of _beauty_ in it all, Marian, but I'm sorry, unless you're going to run off and build rockets or something ludicrous like that I never saw any point to maths—"

"Principles of modern banking," William said, in a cold dismissive tone beyond all patience. "The history of piracy. The paintings of Orozco. Modern French theater. The jurisprudence of Mafia administration. Diseases of camels, the Anglo-Irish novel, the ethnosociology of the Bedouins and fourteenth-century Russian torture techniques and Mongolian equine medicine and the design components of ENIAC and Franco-American privateers' contributions to early United States naval forces and the necrophiliac practices of Ted Bundy. Things like that."

He gave her a broad smile, a perfectly calibrated, sharply exaggerated imitation of her own. Something flared up behind Joanna's eyes, and she nodded to herself.

"I must say, Marian," she said, gripping the pram's handle like it might roll away toward a new life, "I meant everything I said, about being horribly sorry for what happened to you and Robbie, and just awful that I never got round to visiting you afterward—but you know, sometimes terrible things happen in life, and we've just got to carry on and move forward, and really it's best try and to look on it all as blessings in disguise." Her smile had vanished. She stared at William, who was openly enjoying, even relishing, the moment. "I mean, for instance, imagine having _three_ just like him fouling up the nest."

She jerked the pram in a semicircle and wheeled briskly away. Marian exhaled, waiting for the tight waves of heat in her chest and the back of her neck to subside, and then felt William tugging insistently at her sleeve.

"Her husband got sacked," William muttered, close to Marian's ear. "Months ago, for embezzling. All her clothes and that stupid pram and the lot come from savings. Every day, when she thinks he's at work, he's really playing horse races and dog races and anything else he can bet on. He's brilliant at it, he makes loads more dosh than he ever did before, but doesn't do _her_ any good because the other one gets nearly all of it." 

Despite herself, despite all common sense, Marian was getting caught up in this story. "What other one?" she asked. "A mistress?"

"Noooo," William said, annoyed she hadn't caught on, "his wife. His other wife, I mean, that he married nearly the same time. She lives in Surrey, he sees her every time _she_ thinks he's on a business trip. He's got six or seven wives, all over the place, but the one in Surrey, that's the one he really likes."

"So no mistresses, then," Marian said.

William sighed loudly. "Aren't you listening? I never said that. Except, what's the word for a mistress when it's a man?"

Marian thought all this over, as Joanna became a pristine china figurine in the distance. "And how," she demanded, "can you possibly know all this? Or expect me to believe that you do?"

"Mum." He looked urgent, almost pleading: the same look he'd had, years back, needing to be told the tenth time running he wasn't stupid. "I _do._ "

Of course, she didn't believe it. Not for a second. But somehow, listening to it, the fiery knots binding her up had eased and she was able to move her feet again, to propel herself back home. She went back to bed immediately, exhausted, but sensing nonetheless that the next day, if only for an hour or two, she would again get up.

The school began calling. Marian told them not to disturb her while William was ill. Every day they went out together—sometimes only around the block, other times to the far edge of the green or farther—and no matter who they passed or how briefly they saw them William had a story, a ridiculous story told with such absolute conviction that Marian, despite herself, was sometimes on the urge of taking it all as true. And sometimes it was such a small thing, there was no reason it couldn't be true. (That sour-faced man in the vicar's collar? Closet pothead. The elderly woman buying swedes and black forest cake? Lifelong trichotillomaniac. The girl with filthy blonde dreadlocks and the Pink Floyd T-shirt? Perfect pitch _and_ can learn languages faster than Mycroft.) Often, it was absurd. (That ginger woman in the yellow jumper? Watches basketball games constantly, not for the sport—can't fathom it—but can become aroused _only_ by freakishly tall men in loose-fitting short trousers.) Or terrible. (That man with the curly blond hair? Ask him about his collection of photos. Of his sister. When she was barely three. Don't worry, his new best pervert pen friend works for Interpol and that's how they'll finally catch him.)

Not all the secrets were bad ones. The insurance actuary three doors down was an avid, accomplished knitter—which he did only alone with blinds drawn, worried his marvelous pastel candy-floss creations were unmanly. (When he finally overcame this inhibition and went on to become a renowned fiber artist, he'd long since moved to another neighborhood.) The legally blind pensioner two streets away thought her old school friend didn't love her back, but she was quite wrong. The ex-convict living on the other side of the park broke up dogfighting rings, sometimes with blackjack and SAP gloves, and treated the rescued animals like his own children. Sometimes, listening to her son speak, Marian saw networks, actual visible neural pathways branching among whole groups of people who had no idea they were in any way connected. Some of the threads were coils of cable too thick to bend; others were barely visible in any light, broken by the weakest breath. But they were there, they multiplied, they overlapped, they pulled everyone everywhere in more simultaneous directions than anyone could ever fathom. Including William. Including her. Another series of incredibly complex equations.

What was going to connect her to Sherrinford, once the most agonizing spasms of grief finally passed? Reggie, yes—only an awkward voice on the phone now for weeks on end (though, to be fair, they'd both always been ill at ease on the infernal thing), who had also spent all this time lost beyond words. But what within herself, knowing her own body had turned on her child like an interloper? What could she say to herself? Perhaps, though, that was the very thing: The same death had robbed both Sherrinford and herself of speech, a shared history, a common future. The breaking, at once and forever, of the thread between them was, in fact, their unbreakable connection. Still there. A coil of cable too thick to bend, that pulled at her flesh until she wanted to curl up, fetal, from the incessant pain.

But she had never been good at putting things into words, so she kept this idea to herself.

Just once, walking about the streets nearest home, she and William saw that odd neighbor of many years with her odd color-coded children, dragging along the one dressed all in brown (poor, unlucky little bugger) by a rough hand gripping his wrist. Gloria, was that her name? Glenda? Gina? Marian couldn't remember. William studied them both, as he studied everyone, and his eyes narrowed and his lips went tight.

"I don't like you talking to her," he told Marian.

Marian waited, but he offered nothing more. "All right, then," she said, and turned down a side street before they could be seen.

"I want you to call me Sherlock now," he said, a week or two after that. "Not William."

"Well," she said, drawing up her coat collar against the freezing rain, "it's your name just as much as the other. But why?"

"Don't know. I just like it better. Everyone at school calls me that." He shook streams of water from his hair; as always, he'd forgotten a hat. "That or fairy, but I like Sherlock better."

Marian rifled through her pockets, finally producing a plastic headscarf, but he refused it with a revolted glance. "Do you want to go back to school?" she asked him. 

He contemplated the question. "It's good for research," he said. "Sometimes."

She nodded. "Well, if you ever change your mind."

They stood under a shop awning, waiting for a heavier downfall to subside. A couple walked past them: a woman with straight dark brown hair, shabby tan trenchcoat, and mint-green gumboots, a man letting the rain soak through his football jersey without any seeming discomfort. As they passed, William—Sherlock—turned to her.

"They're very rich," he said. "She's an inventor, something to do with radios. Lots of patents."

"And him?" asked Marian.

"Well-managed bipolar disorder. Likes Dianhong tea. Incestuous feelings for his aunt, since childhood, but very severely repressed."

Marian scrubbed her shoe against the pavement, working at a stubborn bit of mud. "And what tells you all that, exactly?" she asked.

Sherlock let out a sigh of the martyred. "Why do you always do this? I keep telling you and telling you, _I know._ All right? Can't you get that through your brain? I look at people, and I watch them, and I just know—"

"No," she said, firmly. "Not enough." 

He started, as though she'd struck him. For a moment, though it passed quickly, he looked a little fearful. "What d'you mean, not enough?" he asked.

"Just what I said. It's not enough, saying you know someone or something terribly important about them but that you can't say why. It's—" She paused, trying to articulate her thoughts. "You can't just know that you know. You have to know exactly how you got there, step by step. I know this thing, this very surprising thing, a little birdie told me and you'll never believe it, but where the birdie flew from I won't or can't say? That's not a deductive conclusion, it's a gossip column. It's a party trick."

_"Mum!"_

"Every theorem requires a proof." She shrugged in the face of his outrage; she hadn't made the rules, after all. "You know it? Then know how you know it, and know how to express how you know it—it mightn't be the fun bit, but it's necessary. It's essential. That's why you would lose that game you used to play with Mycroft, the deduction game. It's not that you were wrong. It's that you could never manage to explain why you were right."

Sherlock was silent all the way home. Sullen, his face a lowering thundercloud mirroring the sky above them, but also thoughtful.

Four days later, Reggie returned. That night, as they prepared for bed, he watched her sitting rubbing lotion into her elbows—he'd been watching her, not nearly as covertly as he imagined, since walking through the door—and cleared his throat. "I think I might end up on the cutting room floor," he said. "Again."

She looked up. "But your character's the whole second half! I read the script—"

"Yes, well." He hunted through his half-unpacked traveling bag for his slippers, humming unconsciously to himself. He always did, searching for things. "That was before the star decided my lines were so good, his character should have most of them."

She sighed. "Well, never mind," she said, though it made her indignant. The _star,_ her eye. What the hell did that overpraised, self-satisfied, frankly inbred-looking Etonian weed have to offer that Reggie didn't? "If they can't appreciate actual talent, it's their loss."

"Well, Budapest was lovely, anyway. We must go back there sometime." Reggie looked up, one slipper in his hand, abruptly hesitant. "If...you'd like to go. Sometime. Doesn't need to be any time soon."

"Yes, I'd like to," Marian said. "Very much. When we have a chance."

Had he actually remembered to pack the other slipper? It was entirely possible he hadn't, then forgot he'd never had it in the first place. He did that. Marian knelt down next to him to search for it. Reggie put his arms out and then they were holding each other, very tightly, for the first time since she'd returned from hospital.

"I thought," he whispered, swallowing hard, "that I made a terrible mistake. That you mightn't be here, when I got back."

She shook her head, not lifting it from his shoulder. "I wasn't here when you left," she said. "I wasn't anywhere. But now, I think I am again."

Much later, years later, Sherlock, when he and his mother were alone and without any preamble, suddenly brought up Sherrinford. Brought him up by name, and with—for him—an infinite caution. As always, as forever, the sudden searing pain flooded through her, and then, as always, it passed.

"That was years ago now, love," she said, calm and reassuring. "I'm well over it."

******

_Shezza_

"You see what I mean?" Mycroft paced back and forth before them, too agitated to keep still, but every word and gesture filled with vindication. "Do you finally see?"

Just behind him Sherlock stood swaying foot to foot, looking at neither his parents nor his brother, dazed or indifferent or possibly both. His clothes hung off him, his eyes were deeply bloodshot, his filthy hair was matted to his scalp. An acrid smell came off him: old sweat, long-unwashed clothing, and underneath that, something undefinable and sickly that seemed to be seeping straight from his pores. A sour-sweet chemical smell that had nothing to do with the labs where he spent all his time at university—or, perhaps, had everything to do with it. Reggie remained silent, looking from his elder son to his younger and back again, and Marian ran a hand back and forth through her hair. She was tired of this, she thought, so incredibly tired. 

"You promised me," she finally said to Sherlock, "that you'd stopped."

"He _promised._ " There was a sneer in Mycroft's voice—not like before, not their Mike's familiar reflexive sneer against the collective idiocy of his parents and his brother and the entire world around him, but a sound of thwarted, barely suppressed rage. "He's terribly good at that, isn't he? Did you actually believe him when he said it was all just a mistake, an _experiment,_ and that he was oh so terribly sorry for disappointing Mummy and Daddy and it'd never ever happen again? Even the two of you couldn't possibly be that naïve, that idiotically trusting—"

"Dear God," Sherlock said, in a furry-tongued slur thick with boredom, "will you ever just shut up."

"Do you have any idea where I found him this time?" said Mycroft, ignoring him entirely, a policeman talking over a petty suspect's head. "What sort of filthy hovel he was lying in, in his own sick and someone _else's_ shit, so high he couldn't even crawl to the door and you believed him when he said he stopped? You ever believe a single word he says about anything?" 

"I told you," Sherlock said, tight with impatience, "I told you and told you and told you, it was for an investigation—"

"That's what you said the last time, darling," Marian said. "It was a lie then, too."

There wasn't any anger in her, just an overwhelming weariness. A need to be alone, with Reggie, somewhere peaceful and very far away from here; a need to grab her sons and shake them both until their teeth rattled, to somehow shake the rage, the destructiveness, the contempt for everyone and everything including themselves right out of them; the understanding that both these wishes were impossible. She perched on the arm of a chair, too tired to stand up and too tense to sit in repose, and felt Reggie put a protective hand against her shoulder.

The shadows under Sherlock's eyes were wide and deep as bruises. He shook his head, evidently amazed his good word was doubted, and flung out his arms in impatience, releasing another wave of sweaty chemical funk into the room. "Why doesn't anyone in this family listen to me? Ever? It was for an _investigation._ I can't just sit in a bloody throne room like some people, waiting for witnesses to come and talk to—"

"Did you do all your investigating alone? Or did you have an assistant—or rather, should I say a mentor, a guide, in your noble and selfless endeavors?" Mycroft clasped his hands behind him, with the expression of a detective about to show a suspect his own, blood-smeared weapon. "The redoubtable young Mr. Wilkes, perhaps?"

Sherlock started, jolted into a sudden, tense alertness. "Stop talking," he said.

Mycroft smiled as he turned back to their parents: a hit, a very palpable hit. "Has Sherlock ever mentioned him to you?" he asked, quite conversationally. "Good old Seb. Dear old fellow, the best friend a boy all on his own ever had if you don't mind being his unwitting court jester, his little royal circle's appointed sideshow freak—"

Sherlock gritted his teeth. "I said, _stop talking._ Now."

"Do you really think everyone's as thick as you are, dear brother?" Mycroft demanded, before Reggie or Marian could say a word. "Or that anyone is? What did you think, you could pass him off to me or anyone else as an actual friend—never mind your own pathetic delusions on the subject—and then Mummy and Daddy could pretend to be oh so terribly enlightened and tolerant when you brought him round to dinner? Is that it? Just two dear turtledoves in their charming little bower—"

Sherlock flung himself on Mycroft, seizing his brother's arm and twisting it hard behind his back. His shoe found Mycroft's instep—another palpable, and audible, hit—and then Reggie was wrestling with him, pulling Sherlock's fists and feet and teeth out of striking distance while Mycroft shouted out loud, retreated halfway across the room in pain and fury. Sherlock was shouting too, inchoate noises of aggression as Reggie frogmarched him toward the green armchair, flung him into it roughly and yet somehow more gently than in years gone, when Sherlock was too young and small to resist.

"Enough!" Reggie shouted, leaning over Sherlock, pinning his wrists to the armrests with a long-practiced grip. "You aren't four bloody years old and he's more than happy to hit you back!"

Sherlock's breathing was audible, his face flushed dark, but he stayed quiet and still. Reggie released his hands, slowly, and looked to Mycroft. "He's right," Reggie said. "Just stop. We could see it and smell it on him before you ever opened your mouth."

Marian crossed her arms over her chest, felt tears pricking at her eyes as she rocked back and forth where she sat: a reflexive gesture to keep herself from running to Sherlock, to Mycroft, knowing one would simply ignore her and the other push her away. "You do these horrible things to yourself," she told Sherlock. "You know they're horrible, and nothing we say or do can stop you and you promised me, that time last July, you—" 

But that conversation had been between them, just her and Sherlock, and she'd learned so much even from what he'd refused to say aloud, and if she said it all aloud now he'd never forgive her. "William. You promised. You promised me that you'd stopped."

Mycroft laughed, an ugly and, somehow, a bereft sound. "Promised he'd stopped. Promised he'd—did you think he even _could?_ Have either of you ever realized what sort of habit he's actually got? And how did you think he was paying for it? From that pittance he gets as a lab assistant? Tell them about dear old Seb, brother. Go on, tell them what you let the pride of Harrow do to you so you can get your precious pharmacopeia, before he kicks you right back out the door like some sort of—"

"Well, brother, thank God you're a paragon of moda—moderation," Sherlock said, stumbling over his words but clearly quite in control of his thoughts. "Apologies from th' bottom of my soul, horribly rude making you cut short your seventeenth meal of the day to run to my rescue when _I never asked_ you to, your greasy fingers all over my life, stench of onion breath 'til my eyes water—ever even tried controlling yourself, Mycroft, after all your little speeches? Ever gone a whole hour at a time without gorging yourself sick?"

"Entirely predictable," Mycroft snarled back. "I'm the bane of your precious existence but you'll be the dirt under his shoe without a second thought, and imagine the world can't smell it on you—what did you think? That'd we all look at the state of your knees and think they got that way scrubbing floors—"

"That's enough!" Marian shouted. "Absolutely enough—stop it! This isn't helping anyone!"

"Oh, you think that's all? You think that's all dear Wilkes demands? Trust me, it's so much worse than that." Mycroft was pacing again, barely seeming to notice the limp from Sherlock's assault on his foot. "Gaveston or no Gaveston, he's finished. He can flourish as a petty little banker or broker somewhere but he'll never get any farther than that, I'll personally see to it—you've utterly humiliated us both!" 

A flame had leapt into Mycroft's cheeks, his face contorting in anger. "And is that really all the response you've got?" he continued. " 'Oh, yes, well, _you're_ fat, Mycroft'? That's it? And who would you rather be, Sherlock? The fat man at the table, or the dog crouching at his feet begging for scraps?" As his color subsided a light flared up, slow and soft, in his eyes. "But you know what, it's entirely possible you don't even know. Is that it? Are you so far gone, are you so bored with the limits of your own sad brain that you're actually enjoying degrading yourself for a dribbling cretin, the sheer novelty of letting yourself be—"

"If anyone's got anything even halfway narcotic," said Sherlock, not just rubbing but abrading his temples, "shoot it directly into my skull so I can stop listening to him forever." 

"Answer me!" Mycroft shouted. "Are you enjoying this?"

"If he is," Reggie said, "he's obviously not the only one. Stop it. Now."

"No wonder you're so massive," Sherlock sneered, ignoring his father. "Vaulted right past windbag into dirigible—keep on pontificating and you'll burst the doors straight off the house."

Mycroft, still marching back and forth, kicked at and nearly capsized an end table standing in his way. "That's really it, isn't it? That's all you've got."

"The doors. The windows. The whole sodding roof."

"You know what, just because our sainted clap-ridden grandmother whored herself out to any passer-by with spare change for any drug she could swallow, doesn't mean _you_ should follow in her pathetic—"

"Right," said Reggie, "you shut up now, or I will pick you up and throw you out of this house, bodily, through the nearest window. Just try me."

"Oh," Mycroft asked, with an air of studied surprise, "are we pretending all that never happened, too? Because believe me, if I were Mum—"

"You're trying me," said Reggie.

He hadn't moved, hadn't raised his voice, but there was something in his face that Marian had never seen there before; not after Sherrinford died, not in that first newlywed fight over Paul, not in that vanishingly rare handful of times, over the years, when he'd truly lost his temper. She'd seen it before though, more than once, in her elder son, and the sight of it reflected back at him made Mycroft take a step backward.

"So," Mycroft said, subdued but still unrelenting, "you've got nothing to say?"

Reggie gazed back at him. "What, exactly, d'you want us to say?"

Sherlock sat there, silent, watching the exchange like a very bored critic at a play destined to close on opening night. Mycroft glanced at him, contempt shadowing his features, then back to his father. "Nothing. You really have absolutely nothing to—"

"I don't care," Reggie said, his words slow and deliberate and impervious to interruption, "if he's been out shooting drain cleaner and dogshit into every vein in his body and working every bloody wharf in the Port of London. Just like I don't care that you and those government friends of yours are out meddling and string-pulling and getting up to the most horrible hushed-up things and pretending it's all for Harry, England and St. George, all the perfumes of Arabia can't start to wash away the stench—because you're my boys, and your mother went through hell to have you and raise you, and there's nothing either of you could do where I wouldn't love you. But don't you stand here and drag your own brother and grandmother _and_ mother through the muck and pretend there's anything noble about it, anything but not wanting _your_ prospects destroyed by us unspeakable embarrassing appendages, us drooling idiots, your flesh and blood—this is all about you. Every bit of it, start to finish. Because everything's always, always about you." His teeth sank into his lower lip, biting hard, then released it. "Because God help you, from the day you were born, you've never been capable of anything else."

The silence, for several long moments, was suffocating. Then Mycroft turned, grabbed his coat from the sofa where he'd flung it and strode out the door without looking back, slamming the door hard behind him.

Reggie stood where he was, staring down at the floor. Sherlock sat where he was, his head lolling against the chair back. Marian rose to her feet, slowly, as if her joints had rusted and gone stiff from disuse; she took Reggie by the arm, and like a docile child he let her lead him to the green armchair. When they each took hold of Sherlock's arms he rose, unresisting, letting himself be held up between them.

"We're all worn out," Marian said, as calmly as she could. "We'll sleep. Sleep, and get this sorted out in the morning."

They headed for the hallway, Sherlock half walking and half dragging his feet against the floor; his head rolled like a ball bearing from one shoulder to the other, that pungent, vinegary reek strongest from his scalp. Suddenly he wrenched himself free, slid to his knees like a marionette with sliced strings, and was copiously sick in a planter. Silently, Reggie cleaned up the mess, and Marian cleaned up Sherlock, and by slow degrees they got him into his old room, his shoes off (and the smell that released made Marian hold her breath), his body stretched out on the bed. Reggie stood there, apparently assuring himself Sherlock wouldn't rise up and bolt the second their backs were turned, then tried and failed to smile.

"Your mother's right," he said. "We can get this sorted in the morning."

Sherlock had already closed his eyes.

They went into their own bedroom and closed the door. Reggie sat on the edge of the bed, sagging helplessly in turn where he sat, and Marian put an arm around him. She was so tired, her eyes were raw and burning.

"I'm sorry, love," he said, quite wretchedly. "For what I said."

"Are you?" Marian asked. "Because I'm not."

They sat that way for some time. 

"He'll be gone in the morning," Reggie finally said. "Just like before. He'll be gone."

"I know," Marian said. "But we can't stop him. We never can."

She was sure, when they finally lay down, that their sadness would evade exhaustion, but Reggie fell asleep immediately and she not long after. She woke with a start several hours later, the fragments of an unpleasant dream vanishing immediately from her mind, and moving carefully so she wouldn't wake Reggie she got up, thrust her feet into slippers, padded down the hallway to check on Sherlock. He might already have gone, she thought, long gone, but when she entered the room he was still there, one arm stretched up and curled over his head, his breathing even and deep. She stood there for a moment, watching him, then turned to leave—

A hand touched her arm, and she jumped. Sherlock was watching her from where he lay, his expression indecipherable, his fingers resting against her sleeve. 

She sat down on the edge of the bed. Sherlock didn't release her, instead pulling her arm, her hand toward him as if it were some sort of curiosity he'd picked up on the beach. His forehead rested against her sleeve, neither of them speaking; then Marian felt a shudder, heard a sharp inhalation of breath and the thin cloth of her nightdress, where his face was pressed against it, suddenly stuck damp against her skin. 

As swiftly as it had happened, it ended, and his head slid back onto the pillow. Moments later, Marian heard the quiet, steady breathing resume. She settled herself more comfortably on the bedside, thinking she would stay just long enough, an hour or two, to assure herself he'd got at least a little bit of sleep before—

When she woke sunlight was streaming into the room and she was half-sitting, half-lying against the headboard, on the perimeter of an empty bed. She pressed her palm against the shallow impression in the mattress, the cluster of kicked-aside sheets; there was still warmth there, though only the faintest trace. He hadn't left her until close to morning.

She put a hand on the bedpost, drawing herself upright, and saw Reggie standing in the doorway with a steaming mug of tea cradled in his palms. When he held it out to her his hands trembled, nearly spilling it on his own shirt cuffs, and she wrapped her fingers around his wrists until they steadied and went still.

******

Months later, the phone rang. Although, gradually, they'd both stopped running for it at the first ring, Marian still felt the old constriction in her chest as she picked up the receiver. 

"He's in Florida," Mycroft's voice said, without preliminaries. "Apparently."

"Florida." Marian considered this strange piece of information. "Well," she finally said, "it's not the moon. Though if he ever decides on the moon, I suppose that's where the launching pads are."

There was silence on the other end of the line.

"Your father's in the garden," she said. "Do you want—"

"No," said Mycroft flatly. Then, after a pause, "Apparently, he's alone. And clean. For now."

"For now," she repeated. More acknowledgment than agreement. She ran a finger over the film of dust covering the cooker, drawing a long curling arabesque.

"I'm glad you called," she said. "Not just with that."

More silence.

"You know," Mycroft said, without any change in tone, "I'm not the bad guy here."

"And nobody has ever said you were."

"Well, it hardly needed _saying,_ now did it—"

"Or thought it," said Marian.

The note of sullenness in that last exchange, it felt like the minutest crack in the ice. An opening. "We've all been worried sick about him, and the all includes you. I know that, and your father knows—"

"Whatever Father knows or doesn't know," Mycroft replied, "he can damned well say it for himself. Someplace where I'm well out of earshot."

The crack had sealed over in an instant, leaving only the old, impenetrable façade. Well, she was used to that, they were all used to it. She had tried. "Where in Florida?"

"Sarasota, Miami, Fort Myers, Tallahassee, ask me again tomorrow. He seems to move about incessantly."

Only Miami sounded halfway familiar. What did she know about Florida, anyway? Alligators, palm trees, blazing sunlight. Pastel houses. That godawful Eric Clapton song. Cocaine, a lot of cocaine.

"What exactly is he doing there?" she asked.

"God knows. Well, I could find out, but honestly, right now I don't particularly care."

Marian added a few stars to her arabesque. The petals of some half-withered flower. "Still," she said, "it's good you—"

"Don't expect constant updates," he said. "One of your children _is_ gainfully employed, and not in police work. Or investigative journalism. Or emergency medicine."

Marian scratched at a dried, stuck crumb with her fingernail. "As I said," she replied, quite calmly, "it was good of you to call."

There was a pause. "Not especially," Mycroft said. "But I knew there'd be no peace until I did."

There was a click.

Marian stood there for a moment, gazing down thoughtfully at the receiver in her hand, then as the dial tone began sounding, replaced it in the cradle. The kitchen table was covered in spiral notebooks, loose papers scribbled in every corner with equations, the latest draft of the treatise she'd been writing and rewriting without feeling any great urgency to finish it; more doodling, she thought, more idle patterns in the dust. She swept it aside and sat down. She was thinking, not of the conversation she'd just stumbled through, but the one she'd had with Sherlock, that time last July. So much he hadn't said, so much roaring and fearful confession in some of that silence, but one thing—thrown off as a careless, downright nonchalant aside—had stuck with her ever since, in all the weeks and months past.

 _If anyone,_ he'd said to her, _no matter when, ever tries to tell you I'm dead? Anyone? Even Mycroft? Don't believe it._

******

_Carl_

"No, don't get up," he whispered. His fingers threaded slowly, sinuously into her hair, stroking her scalp. "You look all in."

Marian's tongue felt at once swollen and deflated, as if it had started expanding to fill her parched, furred mouth and then collapsed from overwork. She wanted to push herself up on the pillows, but somehow her arms would not obey the request; she turned her head, she could still manage that, and saw Reggie lying beside her—not on the bed, as he should have been, but on the floor. Not like he'd collapsed, but curled up fetal with his hands tucked neatly behind his head, as though it'd just occurred to him the carpet made a lovely mattress. Why, and why were they both still dressed? And all the lights still on? The man standing over her kept caressing her hair.

"Mind iffen ah set a spell?" he asked, a cartoon American drawl. "Padners?" 

He jerked his hand from her head as if he'd touched something diseased, then poised himself at the foot of the bed. Still somehow unable to move, unable to muster the means to struggle or shout, she gazed down at her own foot, a small blanket-covered peaked tower pointing toward a bedpost, and at the stranger sitting right next to it. Dark hair, a smooth boyish face with a good deal of forehead, a combination of low-arching brows and downturned mouth that gave him a permanently petulant appearance. The eyes were dark and intelligent and bored straight through her, pinning her where she lay as effectively as her own, mysterious torpor. Down on the floor Reggie didn't stir, though he let out low, ragged noises now and then as if he were in pain. At the sound of it, the man smiled.

"Too easy," he whispered, in his own voice. "Honestly, you're both just too easy—a little of my own formula in the pints, behind the barman's back, and you're down for the count. I gave some to everyone in the pub, just for fun...don't worry, the landlord's dog will sleep it off." He wrapped his fingers around her foot, squeezing gently where the blankets covered her toes. "I was hoping as addled as I made him that dear hubby would drive your car into a tree, save me the trouble of coming round, but this is nice, isn't it? So cozy." His fingers curled tighter. "I can draw this out as long as I like."

His words dropped down through her consciousness as if she were at the bottom of a pit, having to take up each one as it fell and assemble them all, slowly, into coherency. They'd been at the pub—yes, she remembered that—and a man, one she hadn't seen there or ever before in her life, had given them...something, to make them this way. And followed them home, or come home with them without their knowing it. As if he could read every fleeting thought, he chuckled and squeezed her foot just a little harder.

"Good stuff, isn't it?" He grinned, ducking his head for a moment in a show of false modesty, and his grip became even tighter. "My own little invention, just a bit of frivolous fun in between the—I'm going to do this to your son. Well, this and a wealth of other things." His leg twitched, his own foot tapping softly against the floor, as if the very thought of it all made him restless. "The older one, well, I won't need to bother because once he sees what's left of the younger, that'll kill _him_ —but let's not dwell on that whole Freudian quagmire, it even puts me off my dinner." The tapping became faster. "Keep him halfway between sleeping and waking, just enough consciousness to try to fight, and then very slowly, with the closest attention to pain, I'm going to take his life away. Oh, not what you think!" He reared back, releasing her foot and holding up both palms in a gesture of protest, then subsided once more. "I won't necessarily kill him, though I won't necessarily _not._ But the person who used to live in that body, that head, gaaaaazing down on all of us like the great Therefore-I-Am?" His voice dropped to a breathy hiss. "He'll be gone forever."

He had both hands on her foot now, fingertips worrying a soft patch of the blanket's fabric, then forming a circle intertwined around her bones. She could not, Marian thought, concentrate simultaneously on what he was saying—the thread of which, somehow, she kept losing almost before she began—and on trying to move her head, her limbs, her fingers. She recalled, or tried to, what her foot looked like when not wrapped up in sky-blue wool and an insane man's hands, what it looked like bending, stretching, rotating at the ankle. But such movements, it struck her, more gradually than it should have, would not accomplish much. Think of the knee, perhaps. The elbow. The teeth.

"Whaahh..." she said.

That was supposed to be _what,_ as in _What have you done to us, to my husband, what are you doing here, what are you going to do to my sons?_ But her jaw, her tongue, they simply wouldn't order themselves properly, and so that was all she managed. A snaking ribbon of drool puddled at a corner of her mouth, trickled down her chin and neck so she itched to wipe it away, and at the sight her visitor burst out laughing, juddered her foot delightedly up and down in his grasp.

"It's not what you think," he told her, leaning in so close she smelled the faint and faintly bitter odor of almonds on his breath. "It's really not. All the meddling in my affairs, running and running after me, the prying, the poking, the grandstanding—now normally, I'd have forgiven all that and just shot him in the head, but he keeps, trying, to take, what, he knows, is _mine._ " He punctuated his words with a fist slammed noiselessly into the duvet, hard, bare inches from her face. "Ever since we were _kids._ That far back. You know who does that? You know who steals like that? Bullies. Nothing but a little bully, just like his precious Carl."

He waited, clearly expecting this name to inspire recognition. When it didn't, the false bonhomie fell from his features and he leaned in, nose to nose, pressing his thumbs at the corners of her eyes.

"Carl," he repeated, in a whisper. "Carl Powers. If your rotten, senile, sickeningly overpraised little brain has any idea what I'm talking about, as well it should, blink." 

Carl. Carl Powers. Sherlock. As if it knew, somewhere in its drug-addled depths, that something very bad really would happen if she couldn't remember, her brain frantically pushed images to the surface: a little boy's death, on a school trip to London, not long after she and Reggie and Sherlock had stumbled over that body in the park. Sherlock nagging and hectoring and pleading furiously with every adult in the vicinity, insisting that he and he alone knew it was all no mere accident—but Sherrinford came after that, and what became of that particular craze of Sherlock's she'd been far too distracted to ask. Carl Powers. Carl.

The tiny puddle of drool had become a wet spot near her ear. Down on the floor Reggie groaned again, the sound he might make in a nightmare, and she must have followed orders and blinked because the man slid his fingers from her face, leaned back. Hands, she thought. Hands. I must concentrate on moving my hands. 

"Good," he said, with an awful smile. "Good."

Hands, Marian thought. Fingers. 

"Carl was my first, you see," the man continued, settling in more comfortably and resting feet on Reggie's head like a footstool. "I'd wanted to for so long, as long as I could remember, and then—I was so proud. You don't even know. But then _he_ comes blundering in out of nowhere, thinking he knows better than anyone else, training a great spotlight on himself, making all of it all about _him_ —he couldn't even leave me a place in the shadows, no peace and quiet to contemplate my labors—he _wouldn't just leave me alone!_ " His voice skittered into a near-scream; then, breathing slowly and audibly, he pulled himself back together. "You see what I mean? You see? That kind of thing can't be allowed to continue. It's got to be punished, like the rotten, selfish crime it is."

Each finger moves independently, yet they can also act entirely in concert. They can curl into a fist. Nails can join together, and rake flesh.

"And where," he inquired, "does a poor, innocent child learn such nasty habits?" 

I am not paralyzed, she told herself. My brain is a bit confused, but if I were paralyzed I couldn't blink. Or turn my head. Or move my foot. I did that, just now.

He shifted on the bedside, and put his thumbs back on her face. Flat against her brows. "They fuck you up, your mum and dad."

Her foot shifted, moved, beneath the sheets. It prickled, not like ordinary pins-and-needles, but like some unpleasant, coarse thing were scrubbing at her skin— _e pur si muove._ The drug was wearing off, perhaps, just a bit. Careful. Concentrate.

"Condolences on your youngest, by the way," the man continued, more cheerfully. "If only I'd known about it at the time...some punishment, I suppose, for your squeezing out the other two alive. But not enough."

Her hand, the one nearest him, rested on top of the blankets. She shifted it back and forth, just to assure herself she could; the cloth felt strange, as if there were a layer of some other, sensation-deadening fabric between it and her fingers. And that nasty, scrubby sensation. But still.

_Concentrate!_

His thumbs slid to her eyelids, resting just firmly enough against the eyes beneath to hurt. That was good. Further reminder that she wasn't paralyzed, or numb. Her hand slid, silently, painfully, toward him.

"Not nearly, nearly enough," he whispered.

As his thumbs bore down her chin jerked backward, pained and frantic. As if this last-minute resistance just added to the fun he giggled, put a knee to the mattress and leaned against it, looming over her, lifting her head up in his palms to slam it against the headboard. Her hand slid between his legs and the sheer effort of curling her fingers hurt so much, hurt like scalding water or childbirth or some kind of phantom amputation, but as the scorching pain shot up her arm she hung on, clenching, twisting, and there was sudden movement on the floor below them and the man staggered backward, almost falling over Reggie's body, and he howled, and he screamed.

Silence, then, save for audible panting halfway across the room. Marian was sweating, nauseous with pain and the dread of what might come next. She didn't want to turn her head and look. She looked. Their attacker was half-standing, half-leaning against a chair, bright pink spots flaring on his cheeks, his teeth grinding in outraged shock and a hand half-consciously cupping his crotch. He fell into the chair, working feverishly at the laces on one shoe, then pulled it off with the sock and lifted a trouser cuff to examine his bare foot. A wedge of torn, jagged flesh, there at the ankle, and blood where Reggie had sunk his teeth in through the sock and hung on tight. We're dead, Marian thought. Slowly, agonizingly. But then, we already were.

The man studied the bite wound, as if it didn't quite interest him, then pulled on the sock and relaced his shoe. Standing over Reggie he kicked him full force in the side, eliciting wordless cries from Reggie and Marian at once; then he mopped a sleeve across his face, to stanch the tears. He was weeping. With laughter.

"My God," he gasped, staring down at her pink-faced and with an enraged delight, "no crying, no begging, just some pathetic, useless little pensioner's heroics—you two are _adorable!_ Is this where the little madam learned his precious bartitsu, right at mama's sagging knee? Really? Seriously?" He rocked back on his heels, all wide eyes and hungry, exposed teeth. "All right, I give in, because it's just too much. You can live. You and that husband. It's too hilarious, thinking _you_ somehow produced—I've got to get out of here, sorry, about to piss myself. You can live. I'll think of something better—much better—this is too much! You don't know how you've made my night!"

He smiled down at Reggie, still lying there motionless on his side. Then, with another savage kick, he was out the bedroom door, laughing so hard Marian could hear the echoes as he vanished down the hall. Her clutching fingers, her whole arm were still roaring silently with pain. Her head whirled. She opened her mouth to try to speak to Reggie, who was calling out something incoherent that could've been her name, and then a trapdoor opened inside her and she vanished into darkness.

****** 

Fleetingly, in her half-awake confusion, she pictured a great gray-winged bird pecking at the window, and opened her eyes to rain drumming hard against it. Marian clutched her head, raising herself slowly and painfully to a sitting position like a mechanic ratcheting up a car; she breathed in, then out, until satisfied she'd recovered her bearings. Then she bolted into the toilet and vomited up bile.

God, she thought, wiping her parched lips and wincing when she saw her puffy, greenish face in the mirror, whatever I did to feel this way—whatever it was, I'm certain it'll come back to me—never again. Never. Keeping a palm against the wall for balance, she stumbled into the kitchen and found Reggie sitting there, staring down queasily at a plate of dry toast. Like her he was still in last night's rumpled, sweat-stained clothes, with a waxen, almost jaundiced cast to his skin and his lids at half-mast from fatigue.

"Thought I'd let you sleep," he said, froggy and hoarse, and gazed at his mug of tea without enthusiasm. "Did we both have some sort of students' night and not—"

"I don't know," she said, sinking gratefully into a chair and fighting the urge to rest her cheek against the tabletop. "I feel like—like some insomniac Rip Van Winkle."

"I can't have drunk that much," Reggie said. "Not to feel this way. I absolutely can't have. Not to wake up on the _floor._ And my side—my ribs, they're all bruised up on one side. Bit hard to breathe." He pushed the toast aside. "Don't be hurt, but you look almost as dreadful as I feel."

"I've got this disgusting taste in my mouth," she confessed. "Even mouthwash won't shift it."

Reggie rubbed fretfully at his side. "Remember that awful flu the boys got, where we thought we'd have to take them to hospital? Billy kept complaining everything tasted horrid, right before. Got to be flu."

Marian closed her eyes hard, which didn't help the lightheadedness or the strange, burning feeling in her hands. And feet. And eyelids. "Sorry," she said. "I can't sit up anymore."

"No, you can't," he agreed. 

Abandoning the pauper's breakfast, they dragged themselves back to the bedroom, peeled off the clothes they didn't know why they were still wearing, and crawled under the covers with their arms around each other, shivering. Marian could feel her skin heating up, perspiration dampening the clean cotton nightgown, but she was still horribly chilled down to the bone. 

"You're right," she mumbled, her teeth chattering. "It must be flu, I just can't get warm—no, don't get up," she said, as he made a motion to go seek more blankets. "Stay here with me."

They lay quietly, shivering in tandem, Marian stretching and curling up her legs against an ache that just wouldn't subside. They'd gone to the pub, she thought, reaching harder than she should've had to for that memory. They'd eaten—what, Welsh rarebit (for her) and shepherd's pie (for him), this couldn't be food poisoning. One Guinness (him) and cider (her) and she couldn't remember a single other drink, couldn't remember even finishing that—or the rarebit—and then, suddenly, they woke up home and flat-on-the-floor ill. Sick unto death...she slid fingers to her neck, felt at her pulse without knowing quite what that would accomplish. Strong and slow, as it always was. Yet something inside her insisted it had, quite recently, been going very fast indeed, as though she'd had some sort of terrible scare and only now, after herculean effort, had managed to calm herself down.

"Where's the thermometer, anyway?" Reggie asked her, without much enthusiasm. "This must be one hell of a fever."

"Remember? Sherlock took it, ages ago, he wanted to do something or other with the mercury. I never got round to getting another one."

She could remember that, easily, just like he could remember when the boys were ill. Last night, though, after a few bites of rarebit, was nothing but a blank, dark void.

"I had," he said, shifting around to ease the pressure on his side, "the strangest nightmare. A dog got loose somehow in the house—not one of ours, it was this gigantic hound with huge teeth, feet like lion's paws—and then we were in a ring and we were supposed to fight it. Like, like the Roman Coliseum, or something. And I had a shield and a spear, but the spear broke, and the dog was howling and then...nothing. But I swear, I smelled his breath all about me when I woke up. This decayed fruit smell, overpowering, like a diabetic's breath but worse. Like the world's most disgusting rotgut wine." 

He pressed his cheek to the pillow, trying to laugh. "Talk about a fever dream, eh? It's still in my nostrils now. What about you?"

Instead of answering, Marian closed her eyes as the room wavered and tilted before them. 

By that evening the strange sickness seemed to have passed, and while neither of them had any appetite—definitely not for Welsh rarebit or shepherd's pie—they felt nearly restored. But if Marian had dreamed anything at all the previous night, even fleetingly, she had absolutely no memory of it.

******

_Tessa_

A spinach and red pepper quiche, still two-thirds intact. The gingery carrot soup from yesterday's lunch, and some of that really good cheddar that Marian liked. Half a salami, some apples, a custard tart or two. Reggie laid it all out on the kitchen table, without troubling to ask his visitor what he did or didn't fancy, and sat back down again.

"Go on, then," Reggie said, and took a swallow of tea. Overbrewed, he thought, but no matter. They could both do with something bloody strong. A shot of whiskey in it wouldn't hurt either.

A couple of apples, a wedge of quiche and one of cheese, a bowl of soup vanished. His visitor was not just thin but gaunt, all sunken cheeks and loose folds of fabric where his jumper, his trousers, were now far too large; he ate slowly but with steady, intense concentration, as if it were his first proper meal in days. In fact, it might have been. Reggie silently offered the plate of custard tarts, eating one himself when his visitor shook his head, and tried to ignore as best he could an unhelpful, intrusive feeling of unease. Appetite sated, his visitor sat back in his chair, staring steadily at him. Reggie studied the inky midnight sky outside the kitchen windows, then the tabletop, then the man sitting across the table.

"Well, go on," the man told Reggie. "Get it over with. Gloat."

Reggie contemplated these words. "Over what, exactly?"

The man shook his head, laughing without mirth. "Don't be disingenuous, you must be thrilled about this. My great comeuppance, at long last, for all my horrid behavior all these years. Nanny has her naughtiest charge over her knee and just produced the hairbrush—" Suddenly the effort of the jape seemed too much for him, and his shoulders sagged in wearied anger. "You must feel so joyously vindicated."

All that remained of the custard tart was a curl of crust, like a long fingernail paring. Reggie pushed it idly around the plate—he'd never been much for crusts, as a boy he'd eaten fillings right out of the middle and left their shells untouched—and sighed. "Vindicated," he said. "Joyous. Thrilled. That's what you think? You seriously think any of this makes me happy? Christ, even I thought we got on better than that—but then, I always did say I was the family moron." He crumbled the crust between his fingertips, watching the flakes shower over a napkin. "Don't bother chiming in there. I already know full well what you think, I've known it since you were old enough to speak—"

"Are you going to wallow in self-pity all night or are you going to make yourself useful, for once, for once ever in my entire life, and _help me?_ "

Reggie didn't answer for a moment. Not for another moment, either. Not until he saw the little flicker of nervousness in his visitor's eyes.

"Well," he finally said. "That's rather up to me, now isn't it?"

He wasn't proud of himself for that, he'd never be proud of it, but everyone had their lapses, their weak moments, and this was one of his. His visitor's face went momentarily slack with shock: shock that could he no longer simply yank the same old handfuls of strings, make everyone else dance as frenetically as he commanded, and the slow, the very slow-dawning realization that that was no temporary state of affairs. Shock became unhidden fear, which became resignation.

"Will you help me," Mycroft repeated, very quietly.

"Of course I will," Reggie said. "You're my son." He cupped his palms around the mug of tea. "Just, forgive my wondering why exactly you've come to _me._ "

Mycroft studied his plate, empty now but for a half-eaten piece of cheddar. "You have no idea how complicated that question really is," he said.

"By which you mean," Reggie said, "that there isn't actually anyone else to go to anymore." He took another gulp of tea. "Which means things are even worse for you than I'd thought."

Did the boy (yes, he and Billy were still _the boys,_ they would be all their lives like it or lump it) have any idea how much it frustrated Reggie—shamed him, even—that his own flesh and blood thought him so utterly, incurably stupid? So stupid that even now, Mike looked half-amazed Reggie had put his finger on it? God, Reggie thought, Mike looked awful. He looked as if awful things had been done to him—the sort, though Reggie rarely let himself think about it, that Mike could once have done himself, or ordered done to others. As if something in him had been forcibly rattled loose, and snapped clean off, and broken. My boy.

Mycroft rested his chin in his hand. " 'I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years'—no, I'm not the clever little mouse with the bolt-holes, and certain other connections have been...unexpectedly severed." He chuckled, quietly, seemingly at himself. "I even seriously considered going to Rudy, but—"

"Ruth," Reggie said. And, when Mycroft looked puzzled, "It's Ruth now. Has been for a bit. Didn't Sherlock tell you?"

Seeming neither surprised nor especially interested, Mycroft shook his head. "No, as a matter of fact he didn't. Perhaps it amused him, imagining my faux pas at some future family gathering."

"So have you two had a falling out, then?" Reggie asked. "You and your brother, I mean. On top of all the rest."

"No," said Mycroft. "Blessedly, for once in his life, doubtless just on a whim, he's doing what I _told_ him and staying well out of the way, until I say otherwise. I'll...later, I'll need him later, but just now we're both safer if he knows nothing. When he finally does work out where I've gone, do him a favor and let him imagine it was a singularly brilliant deduction."

The last one left, Reggie thought, who'll still jump when you snap your fingers. Even though Billy would deny it to the grave. He reached for the remaining custard tart; he wasn't hungry, but eating at least preoccupied him a bit. Something to do with his hands.

"What happened, exactly?" he said.

"You know perfectly well I can't answer that."

"Well, I was hardly expecting Wikileaks, but, y'know, the barest idea of—"

"I gather you still read the papers?" Mycroft's voice was sharp, but his eyes full of exhausted defeat. "Then you know who some of them are, even if you have no idea what they really are. They, and those you know but will never read about, and those you will never know _or_ read about...they came to a détente, a ladies' and gentlemen's agreement—for reasons I know, for a fact, you would not understand—and the agreement was that I and my particular faction were of no further use to anyone." He gazed over Reggie's head, off into the distance. "And after that, for reasons truly beyond my control, the trail, shall we say, grows cold."

The tart was suddenly nauseatingly sweet, a mouthful of gelatinous candy floss. Reggie put it back on the plate, one bite taken out. "I thought your faction was the only faction," he replied. "That's what Sherlock always made it sound like, anyway."

Even now Reggie expected sneering, insults, the old incredulity at just how stupid he'd shown himself to be, but instead Mycroft just gave him a look of pity.

"There is never an 'only' faction," he said. "Never. Ever." Mycroft threaded each hand into the opposite sleeve of his jumper, as though he'd grown cold. "But just this once, don't feel foolish. You're not the only one who forgot that."

Just beyond the window came a shrill, strangled screaming. Mycroft jumped in his seat, looking wildly and wide-eyed around him for a moment; then he recognized the sound and, with a flickering, awkward glance at Reggie, he recovered himself. They sat there for a few moments, listening as the fox calls grew in volume and frequency and, just as abruptly, receded into the night. Reggie looked toward the hallway but Marian, always a heavy sleeper, still hadn't stirred.

"All those friends," he said, more to himself than Mycroft, "with all that power. That people would kill for. Kill for all the time. And this is what comes of it." 

Mycroft smiled, or rather, he forced the corners of his mouth unwillingly upward. "I have contacts," he explained. "Connections. Colleagues. Mentors. Protégés—had. Once. Not anymore." A shadow passed over his face, and lingered. "Him, my dearest brother, now _he_ has friends. Apparently. And despite many of his own best efforts. I never imagined the difference could ever possibly be relevant."

Reggie remained silent. He remembered, suddenly, Mycroft's one visit after Sherrinford's birth and death, during those awful months when Marian had taken to bed and couldn't get up and he, Reggie, was afraid to really try and coax her, too afraid—and too sad—to say or do much of anything. Mycroft had stood gazing at her, twisted in the bedsheets in an abnormally fitful doze; after a few moments he passed his hand over her hair, lightly, his fingertips slow as if he were attempting, somehow, to memorize what he touched. His face, as he did so, showed a look of bog-standard humanity that would've mortified him if he'd been anywhere near a mirror. Reggie, standing unobserved in the doorway, retreated before Mycroft could register his presence, and the two spoke little, even less than usual, before Mycroft was off to...wherever, again.

"I'll be your friend," he said. He plucked the piece of cheddar from Mycroft's plate, nibbling to take away the custard's sweetish echo. "Not what you'd ever have picked, I know, but you're in no position to pick and choose."

Mycroft seemed to retreat, further, into the recesses of the ill-fitting jumper. "So this is what I've come to then, is it?"

"Apparently so," Reggie said softly.

A soft tapping sound made them both turn. From the hallway a small figure approached them, its black muzzle gone almost entirely white, moving arthritis-stiffened hips with slow, painful determination as if negotiating stilts. It stopped before Mycroft, cloudy-white eyes gone cloudier with confusion; then, gradually, recognition dawned and Tessa's tail thumped against the kitchen floor's tiles. Mycroft looked down on her in something like amazement.

"Eumaeus, what a noble hound," he said, as he scratched behind her ears. "How in God's name is she still alive?"

"Oh, the vet says she's perfectly healthy," said Reggie. "She's just perishingly old, is all. Spends all her time now asleep by the window, in that old laundry basket. She used to look for you, you know, she'd sit by the umbrella stand waiting. But she's a cheerful little thing, she didn't pine."

"It's the tidbits she missed," Mycroft said. "The ones I'd smuggle to her. They're all rank little opportunists. Much like their masters."

Tessa settled herself at Mycroft's feet, or rather, across them. Almost immediately, he and Reggie heard small, guttural snores.

"Are we in danger?" Reggie asked, quite matter-of-factly.

"You and Mum, you mean? From all this? No." Mycroft threaded his arms back into his sleeves. "You've never been considered relevant enough to be worth the trouble, and even if I told you everything you can be written off as doddering, demented old lunatics, ranting about secret agents and staged moon landings." Some of the old sardonic look returned. "Particularly in this new golden age of austerity, a far more budget-conscious approach than surveillance and elimination. Even the factions, you know, have to answer to...supervisors."

Reggie nodded. "It can be very useful, sometimes," he noted. "Always being underestimated."

"I wouldn't know."

Reggie shrugged.

"You'll be my friend," Mycroft repeated. "And what does that mean, exactly? Yes, I asked you to help me, you said you would help me, but how can you possibly, in the remotest—"

"We made you, didn't we? And your brother?" (Brothers, Reggie thought, brothers, but right now that little flash of pain was a distracting hindrance.) "Your mother and me? So there must be some actual cleverness lurking in there somewhere, if we can shake it out and apply it to the occasion. If it really won't make any difference if you tell us everything, then fine. Tell us. And we'll think of something."

Mycroft studied his father. "You know perfectly well that you don't want to know everything."

"Fine. Everything halfway relevant, that you think I can hear without fainting. All right? I know, you've just got to have some secrets left—"

"I never said—"

"And as I said, we'll think of something."

"This is ridiculous," said Mycroft, around gritted teeth. His chin was tucked close to his chest, as he'd done as a small child when working up to an epic sulk. "It's absolutely ludicrous."

Reggie sat back in his chair. "It's what you've got." 

Mycroft glowered at the floor. Then, by slow degrees, he seemed to recover something passing for calm.

"You know," he told Reggie, "or really, perhaps you don't, I've always regretted that phone message, after Sherrinford was born and—after he was born." He looked up again, not contrite but merely relaying a necessary fact. "I didn't actually know."

That phone message. Reggie had played it after he returned from hospital, as he was going from room to room finding one petty task after another to put off forever, somehow, dismantling the empty nursery: his eldest son, speaking in the drawling cadence of one terribly bored and getting a terribly tedious, onerous task over with the bare minimum possible effort . _So, is the runt of the litter safely ensconced in the nursery, so the novelty can wear off and the crushing tedium begin? I'll never understand why you've both done this to yourselves, when you're wheelchairing home from the pensioner's pub crawl for feedings you'll wish Mum had just lost it halfway through like all the others, but nonetheless I suppose I should—_ Reggie had erased it then, and very calmly packed away the cot and the cot bedding and the changing table and the toys, and had left it to Mike to find out in his own time. Probably from Billy. But back then, Reggie hadn't cared. 

"Funny," Reggie said. "You always knew so much—everything, according to you—but that, you just didn't know. Somehow, that escaped you."

"I _didn't_ know, for God's sake. I—"

"I know you didn't," he replied, without anger. "We both did. Because you didn't choose to find out. Because you didn't think it at all important, because it was something to do with your mother and me. Demented old lunatics that you've always thought us to be."

Mycroft let out an incredulous little laugh. "What I always thought you to be—among other things—was so cretinously cheerful it made me pray for death. But if you've got bitter, don't blame it on me."

"I'm not bitter." Reggie said. "I'm really not. I'm truthful. Honest and to the point. You might try it yourself, more often."

Time was—and it was not at all a long time—that far less than that would've made Mike push back from the table in an outraged screech of chair legs, hurl some perfectly cutting invective and stalk from the room in a cloud of wounded godhead. He'd always been so bloody dramatic (his genes, of course, Reggie accepted all the blame), far worse than Billy even if it was Billy who could scream himself blue. Now, though, Mike sat with his chin still down, head tilted off to the side, the old thundercloud floating overhead. Despite that, though, he had the face of his childhood: concentration, contemplation, benign calculation. Amazing. He was actually considering, _seriously_ considering, something the old man had said to him—

—and would reject it, categorically, as soon as he was in any position to argue. Still, Reggie thought, it was something. You can't build Pompeii in an afternoon.

"I suppose we didn't do you any favors," he said to Mycroft. "When you were growing up. But we didn't know how. We tried our best."

The statement hung in the air. Reggie gnawed absently at the cheese.

"I think," Mycroft said, after a few moments, so quietly Reggie had to learn forward to hear him, "that I am the greatest coward who ever lived."

Reggie put the cheese back down. "How?" he asked, just as quietly.

Mycroft raised his eyebrows, and let out another, rather helpless laugh. "Where to begin. Really. Where."

"Anywhere," said Reggie. And waited.

"To begin?" Mycroft's hands snaked deeper into the jumper. "I—I don't want pain. I can't—it's humiliating. It's terrifying. It's annihilating."

"It's part of life," said Reggie.

"Not the sort of pain I'm speaking of," said Mycroft.

He pulled his hands from his sleeves, resting one against the table's edge, running the fingers of the other over his empty plate. There was a tremor in them, Reggie suddenly saw, that hadn't been there before, and two or three of the fingers were bent at unnatural-seeming angles. Like trees thrown on a tilt by a bad storm, but not quite uprooted.

"I may be the family moron," Reggie said, "but I'm also a stubborn old bastard. We will think of something, to get you out of this mess."

Mycroft seemed to sink down further in his chair. "I can't think," he said. There was something raw in the words. "Not anymore. Not for weeks. Or months."

"Then don't," said Reggie. He rose from his chair, gathering up the plates. "Rest. Knit up the raveled sleeve of care, and all that." He glanced at Mycroft. "You know us, it's not like we're going to think of anything brilliant anyway in just a few weeks. Or months."

Mycroft didn't quite smile, but he didn't quite not.

The only sound in the room was the clink of china and Tessa's rhythmic, senile snores. Reggie stacked the plates in the sink, the teacups, and when he went to retrieve the forks and spoons saw Mike still sitting upright in his chair, his cheek resting against his shoulder, deeply and profoundly asleep. Reggie stood there, watching him for a moment, then deposited the silverware in the sink, returned everything to the refrigerator, and went back down the hall toward his and Marian's bedroom.

Marian lay sprawled on her back against the pillows, an arm flung out to the side, one bare foot sticking out from the profusion of sheets and blankets and duvet. As always, even now, he had to restrain an untoward urge to tickle it, and that thoroughly inappropriate, trivial little thought somehow restored his nerve, strengthened his resolve. He put a hand to Marian's shoulder, more nudging it than shaking it, until the movement made her stir. She blinked.

"Is it morning?" she murmured in confusion. "Already?"

When he didn't answer her she blinked again, her eyes focusing, the blurriness of sleep rapidly fading away. Sensing, in his silence, something strange—unprecedented, even—she passed a hand over her eyes and sat up.

"Reggie?" she said.

"Mrs. Holmes," he said, "we're needed."

END

_(Written 2015)_

**Author's Note:**

> Marian's mother's backstory was inspired by Pat Barker's novel [_Blow Your House Down_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blow_Your_House_Down). Sherlock's answer to "What are you reading?" is lifted, with a few changes, from [a character's dialogue in _The Manchurian Candidate._](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056218/quotes?item=qt0387515)
> 
> The Holmes' strange neighbor and her "color-coded children" are the protagonists of Joanne Harris' novel [_Blueeyedboy._](http://www.joanne-harris.co.uk/books/blueeyedboy/) This neighbor is also the "Someone" of the anonymous messages and, without spoiling too much of the book, Sherlock never did his mother a bigger favor than warning her away.


End file.
